Hartwood’s eyes darted left, then right; the eyes of a cornered rat, preparing to lie its way out of the trap.
“Whatever he told you,” he said. “Redfearn - whatever he said, it ain’t true.”
Angela Di Salvo seemed to consider this new information.
“Just to be clear,” she said calmly. “You’re saying he didn’t sell you the Jag you tried to sell to me this morning? And that wasn’t you on the answerphone message he played me at his office, telling him that that Jag - to repeat, the same Jag you just tried to sell me - had been clocked?”
He looked away; lowered his head.
“Now,” she continued, “he told me he’d done no such thing, and it was just you trying your luck - trying to have your E-Type cake and eat it too. But he’s a bent bastard, same as you. He wouldn’t be my brief if he wasn’t, would he? Be just like him to clock a car and sell it on if he thought he could get away with it.”
“So on the one hand, if he’s telling me the truth, then the bloke I was about to hand over six million of my hard-earned to - that’s you - is a scam artist who might be setting me up to fleece me, after the fact.”
“And on the other, if he’s lying and he did sell you a dodgy motor… I’ve got you trying to pass it onto me, knowing it was clocked.”
“Do you see how neither of these looks good for you, Mr Hartwood?”
Karen pressed the safety catch on the pistol, which released with an audible click.
Hartwood shuddered.
“Cat got your tongue?” El said.
He looked up at her imploringly.
“I’d never,” he said through chattering teeth. He was shivering now, goose-bumps breaking out across his skin. Another trickle of urine ran down his bare leg; pooled under him on the carpet.
“You’d never what?”
“I’d never scam you. It weren’t like that.”
“But you didn’t mind scamming my brief?”
“I didn’t know who he was. I never woulda otherwise, I swear.”
“So you did set him up?”
He didn’t answer. Karen twisted the handle of the pistol, digging through the greasy, sweat-drenched roots of his hair with the end of the barrel.
El crouched down in front of him so that they were face to face, her nose wrinkling in distaste as the smell of the urine hit her.
“I don’t appreciate someone thinking they can take me for a ride,” she said softly. “So I’m thinking that you owe me, Mr Hartwood. Nod if you agree.”
He nodded.
“Glad to hear it,” she continued. “Now, the good news for you is: I know just how you can make it up to me. Me and Jax here, we’ll be taking that Royale of yours with us when we go. No questions asked, no money changing hands. That alright with you? Nod again, if it is.”
He nodded again, even more vigorously than before, his head pistoning back and forth on his shoulders.
By now, she thought, Ruby and Dexter would be inside the hangar - hot-wiring the rings of cars that stood between them and the Royale and rearranging them like Tetris blocks until they had room to drive the one they’d come for through the doors and out of Lambswool Hall, across the field.
“Alright, then,” she said.
She got to her feet.
“Just one last thing,” she added casually. “Before we leave you to… clean yourself up.”
He tried to speak but failed, his shivers so intense they impeded his effort to form words.
“What was that?” she asked, cupping a hand to her ear.
“I said, anything,” he replied eventually. “Anything you want, you can have it. Just please, please don’t hurt me.”
She let her nose wrinkle a second time, Angela Di Salvo’s revulsion at his weakness and his cowardice a tangible presence in the room.
“It seems to me, now we’ve had this conversation,” she said, “that you might not need telling. But I’ll say it anyway: you send anyone else after Redfearn, anyone at all, and we’re going to have words. You and Jax are going to have words. You understand me? He may be a bent bastard, but he’s my bent bastard. And he’s useful to me, very useful. So I really don’t appreciate you trying to gut him like a fish.”
Hartwood’s head jerked up from his chest, fast as a bullet. There was surprise on his face now, as well as fear; surprise, and confusion.
“What?” he said.
“You don’t want to hurt Hartwood,” Ruby had told them, back in her new West Hampstead flat - Michael bandaged on the sofa and the others crowded around him in a Nativity tableau. “But you do want to give him a scare. A bad one.”
“That’s it?” El had said, taken aback at the mildness of Ruby’s vengeance. “Just scare him?”
“You reckon we ought to leave a horse’s head in his bed?” she’d answered scornfully. “Think, girl. Most important thing, the only important thing is getting this one,” she’d gestured a thumb towards Dexter, “out of the grave he’s dug himself. That’s your priority. And you do that by working that weasel Hartwood over ’til he’s shitting himself worried you’ll come back and do him if he so much as sneezes near one of yours again.”
El had believed her; had trusted that what she was saying was the truth. But she also knew her well enough to be reasonably sure that what she was hearing wasn’t the whole of the truth - that there was more to it, a twist somewhere in the tale.
“And the rest?” she’d asked.
Ruby had played it deadpan for all of half a second before she’d folded, the papyrus creases of her face collapsing in on themselves in a broad, knowing smirk.
“You ever met a petrolhead?” she’d said. “A real one, not one of them weekend warriors? They bloody love their cars. Love ‘em like a wife, like a daughter. And when they lose one… it’s like a death. They grieve. So if this goes our way, and we manage to get that Bugatti out of his lockup… believe me, it’ll hurt him more than if we stuck him in the ribs with his own bleedin’ knife.”
Hartwood fixed her with what she thought he might describe, in more lucid moments, as an honest look: one that said that what he was about to tell her was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.
“I never,” he said, the quake in his voice gone. He sounded sure now; certain of the veracity of what he was saying. “Christ as my witness, I never laid a finger on him.”
She studied him. He wasn’t blinking; wasn’t licking his lips or touching his face. Nothing about him suggested deception.
“Call me a cynic,” she said, “but I’m really not sure I believe you.”
His breathing quickened - not, she thought, because he was gearing himself up to lie, but because he so badly wanted her to believe him.
“What would I do it for?” he answered, sounding desperate. “Yeah, alright, I tried to squeeze a bit of money out of him. But what would I get out of hurting the geezer? Think about it - it don’t make no sense. I wanted paying, and he couldn’t very well pay me from his coffin, could he?”
She couldn’t deny the logic of it.
But if it wasn’t Hartwood, she thought, who was it? Who else would want to go after Dexter, specifically? Or Michael, for that matter?
“If you’re lying to me,” she said, the suggestion of threat now explicit, undeniable, “you’ll regret it, Mr Hartwood.”
“I ain’t lying!” he shouted. “Whatever happened to Redfearn, it weren’t me that done it!”
She found herself believing him; wondered if Rose and Karen thought the same.
Karen’s face, directly behind Hartwood’s, suggested she might - her wide-eyed expression the antithesis of the aggressive certainty her body language still communicated.
“You got the ropes?” El asked Rose, without turning around.
“Yeah,” said Rose gruffly, in a Mockney accent El thought she might have picked up from Eastenders. “Got ‘em in the bag.”
El nodded at Karen.
“Tie him up and gag him,” she told her. “We�
��re done here.”
There was silence in the car as they drove away from the estate. It didn’t break until they hit the dual carriageway - heading south, back to London.
“What are we thinking?” Karen asked, her eyes on the road and hands gripping the wheel.
“It wasn’t him,” said Rose from the back seat. “He didn’t do it.”
No, El thought; no, he didn’t.
“I agree,” she said. “But where does that leave us?”
“We’ll need to tell Ruby,” said Rose.
“Yeah,” said Karen. “But she’s on the road still. Her and Dexter both. And I don’t fancy ringing Michael to tell him, do you?”
“Sita,” said Rose. “Call Sita. She won’t have gone to bed yet – she’s always been a night owl. And she’ll want to know how things went.”
“Knock yourself out,” Karen told her.
Rose took her phone from her bag: a new handset, El noticed, smaller and less blocky than her last, the casing a darker grey and the aerial more discreet.
She pressed a button, then another, and the echo of a dialling tone filled the car’s interior, leaving El unsure about whether or not she ought to be listening in.
The dialling stopped abruptly, and she heard a voice - tinny and distant, its features indecipherable.
“Sita?” Rose asked - a look of uncertainty, and then of concern passing over her. “What? What happened?”
“What?” Karen demanded. “What is it?”
The voice spoke, as indistinct as before.
“No,” said Rose into the mouthpiece - sounding urgent, panicked. “No, absolutely not. Stay where you are. Lock the doors, phone Barbara Potter and stay where you are. We’re on our way.”
She pressed another button on the mobile, apparently ending the call, and the voice vanished into the ether.
“What’s going on?” said Karen, fingers tightening further around the wheel. “Don’t fuck about, just tell us.”
Rose looked stricken, El thought; utterly horrified by whatever she’d just heard.
“That was Sita,” she told them, shaking her head. “She’s been… it’s impossible, completely impossible.”
“What is?” said El.
Rose stared at the phone in her hand as if willing it to elaborate, to reframe whatever Sita had told her into some form of narrative coherence.
“She’s been attacked,” she said. “Stabbed. On her doorstep, like Michael. Exactly like Michael.”
Chapter 8
South Kensington, London
July 1997
Looking out of the window: that had been her first mistake. Not the only one she’d made that evening, in retrospect. But certainly her first.
Midnight had been and gone when she’d heard the screech of braking tyres on the street below; the familiar rattle of van doors opening, of something heavy (and already, in her mind’s eye, valuable) lifted out and placed gingerly onto the pavement outside her building. It was unusual, but not unheard of for her neighbours to receive their more expensive deliveries in the early hours; the standard English conventions of not drawing attention to oneself, not disturbing the peace, not causing a fuss were, she’d found, less rigorously policed among the obscenely wealthy denizens of Knightsbridge and South Ken than elsewhere in the capital. And practiced, certainly, with less ardour.
She’d tried to resist the urge to look; to see for herself what treasures - what Georgian console tables, what Regency desk sets - might be making their way even at that moment into one of the grander apartments of the Chatham Court complex. She’d prepared herself a lemon tea; smoked one of the few cigarettes a day she allowed herself, in her dotage; begun to heat the water for a late-night bath. And still the van had rattled; still the engine of the van had thrummed, calling out to her like the thump of a heartbeat under the floorboards.
When she could take it no more, when the temptation to know became too great to bear, she slid her bare feet into a pair of sandals, fetched a lightweight bolero jacket - now dishearteningly tight around the upper back - from her dressing room, slipped out of her apartment and down the three flights of stairs to the foyer.
She’d hoped to catch a glimpse of whatever was being unloaded through the reinforced glass of the outer doors. But the angle of the van - a dirty white van, she’d seen then, dusted with a layer of grime so thick that the number plate was almost entirely obscured - was such, its bulky chassis so poorly parked that she could see almost nothing of its cargo without stepping beyond the immediate bounds of the apartment block. All that had been visible of the mysterious item was the furthest end of the opaque plastic sheet that covered it, its particular distentions suggestive of a square-bodied shape, or possibly a rectangle.
She unbolted the foyer doors - top, middle and bottom - and stepped tentatively out into the dark, her eyes on the van.
“And that was when he came at me,” Sita told them - her damaged arm resting flat on the waxed mahogany of her dining table as Barbara Potter sutured together the tears in her skin. “He’d pulled a balaclava over his face, but a knife that sharp, that ornate - you really couldn’t miss it. Thankfully he didn’t seem to have a clue how to use it. Just came slashing at me, like something out of a horror picture. Got me here, as you can see,” she gestured to her static arm, “but I imagine - frankly, I rather hope - it will be quite some time before the feeling returns to his wrist.”
“You’re saying you fought him off?” asked Karen, incredulous.
“I may be richer in years than I used to be, darling,” Sita replied matter-of-factly, her speech barely faltering as Barbara drove the needle in, “but I’m faster than I look. And so much of self-defence is in the leverage, in the manipulation. Applying the right pressure in the right spot at the right moment. A principle all of us can get behind, I daresay.”
She smiled, and El saw the scene as it might have unfolded: the man, face covered, approaching Sita with his strange arced weapon held high over his head; Sita’s arm rising to block the blade as it flew toward her, her body spinning not away from but into his as the flesh of her forearm absorbed the blow; both her hands reaching down to his, seeking purchase on the wrist that held the handle and then twisting, up and round and over until his palm opened and the knife fell to the ground, its danger spent.
Barbara Potter shook her head sadly, regretfully - no doubt lamenting the foolishness of an old woman with such cavalier disregard for her own safety.
“Where did he go?” Rose asked - looking more serious than Karen, more frightened. “Or she?”
She’s thinking of her, El thought. Of Hannah.
Bloody Moriarty.
Hannah D’Amboise, or whatever she was currently calling herself, was Rose’s half-sister - a fact that had come as a greater surprise to Rose than to anyone, when it was finally made known. Dexter’s certainty that Hartwood, and only Hartwood, had been behind the attack on Michael meant that none of them had named her in relation to his stabbing - though this certainty, El suspected, was only part of the reason. Since her disappearance and the events that precipitated it, even Hannah’s name had seemed to El to possess a kind of power, a talismanic potency that prevented them from invoking it unless absolutely necessary - as if saying it aloud would cause Hannah herself to appear before them like a Fury, ready to extract vengeance.
It’s why she’s Moriarty even in my head, El thought. It feels safer, somehow. Less like I’m tempting fate.
“He,” Sita assured her. “Most certainly a he. I’d inferred as much from his height, but the toe I was able to connect to his more… delicate parts rather confirmed it.”
“Nice one,” said Karen, nodding approvingly. “Like it.”
“You were going to tell us where he went?” El said.
“Towards the main road,” said Sita. “In that dirty white van, no less. He didn’t run away - he drove. And I’m afraid I couldn’t muster the energy for a hot pursuit, after my initial burst of heroics.”
“It was h
is van?”
This was from Rose.
“His van, and indeed his pile of empty cardboard boxes under the plastic sheeting he left behind him when he fled. I’m rather embarrassed to say that what I took to be a furniture delivery may in fact have been a ruse.”
“A ruse?” El said. “You think he was trying to lure you outside?”
“Fucking hell,” said Karen under her breath. “Fucking hell.”
“It sounds so unlikely, doesn’t it?” Sita answered. “There are more than a dozen private apartments in my building alone, over thirty permanent residents. But given how he reacted when I did go outside… I’d say there’s every possibility that it was, as Auntie Ruby might put it, one of them setups. And then, of course…”
She stopped herself; shot a brief, reflexive glance at Barbara Potter. El didn’t think the others caught it, but it was a look she’d seen before on Sita, many times - a look that said she had more to tell, maybe a lot more, but that now wasn’t the time to tell it.
“So he knew you,” said Karen, sprinting towards the conclusion El had reached herself. “He needed to get you out of the flat and on your own so he could come at you, and late at night so no-one’d be watching and try to stop him, but he knew you wouldn’t just be wandering round without a reason. And he knew what you’re like, what you like - what sort of shiny antique bollocks he’d have to dangle in front of you to get your attention. He knew you, Sita.”
“Yes,” said Sita. “Yes, I believe he did.”
Barbara Potter finished up the sutures just as Ruby and Dexter arrived, the two of them bursting through the front door like a small, localised hurricane.
El wondered who’d called them - Karen, or Rose, or Barbara herself. That Ruby would have a key to the apartment was a foregone conclusion.
“Christ almighty, woman!” Ruby said, rushing to Sita and taking stock of her arm, the narrow row of butterfly stitches now holding the bruising flesh together. “What the bleedin’ hell have you done to yourself?”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 7