The Push (El Gardener Book 2)

by Natalie Edwards

  “Interesting’s right,” the woman snorted. “Lot more hookers here than in Nacogdoches, I’ll tell you that. That’s Texas,” she added, for his benefit. “Moved out here in ’86 and never looked back since. But forget about me - you sure as shooting didn’t come to read my diary. Tell me about you. Tell me what it is I can do for you.”

  He took a sip from his water bottle; sat up straighter on the couch.

  “I’ve met a lot of private detectives, Miss Hopkins,” he said. “Not so many out here, but I should think I’ve burned through most of the ones in the phone book back at home over the years. Good ones, too. Ex-coppers, ex-Special Forces - the sort of men who know what they’re on about.”

  “Laurel’s just fine,” the woman said. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth for Miss these days. But let me stop you right there. These other investigators, back in England - you say they were good. Did none of them get you what it was you were looking for? From the way you’re talking, and the fact you’re sitting right here with me today and not with them, I’m thinking maybe they didn’t.”

  “And you’d be right. Not one of ‘em got so much as a sniff of a lead. Useless, the lot of them.”

  “The… issue you commissioned them to look into. Would it have anything to do with what landed you in jail?”

  This seem to rattle him. His eyes narrowed.

  “My work takes me all over, Mr Wainwright,” she added mildly, by way of explanation. “I have friends in England, friends at Scotland Yard. And I find it’s generally good practice to pick up the phone and make a couple calls before a client comes to see me. So please, don’t take offence. I do it with everyone.”

  He swallowed back more water.

  “No,” he said, mollified. “Not that. Nowt to do with that.”

  “What, then, if I can ask?”

  “It’s my daughter. She was taken.”

  “Taken?”

  “From me and my wife. My… first wife. A long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  Laurel reached for the notepad and fountain pen resting on the side-table by her elbow, flipped it open and began to write.

  “Forty two years,” he said.

  The pen stopped, and Laurel let out a low whistle through her teeth.

  “That’s a long time,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And this was in England?”

  “Harrogate. Yorkshire.”

  She snapped the cap back on the pen and laid it and the notebook back down on the side table.

  “Mr Wainwright,” she said, not unsympathetically, “please don’t think me insensitive, but you understand that I have to ask: what are you doing coming to me with this, right now? Like I said, I work all over, and like it says on my card, I’m pretty damn good at tracking folks down when they go missing, even if I tell you that myself. But this is the first time anyone’s ever come hollering for me to get on a case that happened better than four decades ago and five thousand miles away.”

  He pressed the water bottle to his brow and held it there.

  “Do you need me to put on the fan?” she asked him. “I should have said: I keep it off, even in summer. People say we’re in a heatwave right now, but it feels cold as Christmas here to me, always has.”

  “No,” he answered quickly. “No need, not on my account. And as to the other thing… I can see as how it might sound funny, when you put it like that. And if we’d been here talking even a fortnight ago, I’d probably have agreed with you. But this week… I suppose you could say I got given something. New information - the sort of thing you can’t very well argue with. And I thought, since you’re here and I’m here and finding people seems to be your bread and butter, it might be that you can help me out.”

  She took a moment to consider this. Then, appearing to make up her mind about whatever she’d been debating, picked the pen and notebook back up again.

  “This new information,” she said. “Let’s start with that. What is it you were given?”

  He reached for the briefcase at his feet, pulled it onto his lap and opened the locks, then put a hand inside and pulled out a crumpled, much-folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and passed it across to her. It was a colour printout of a photograph, she saw - one showing a pale, red-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties, her teeth bared in a tight smile.

  “What am I looking at here?” she asked.

  “My daughter,” he said quietly. “I’ve not seen so much as a hair on her head since 1955, but I’m telling you, sure as we sit here: it’s her. What you’re seeing is what she looks like now.”

  “I don’t want you to pretend to look for the child,” Soames had said, two months and a thousand small deceptions earlier. “Wainwright’s been burned so many times, you’d squeeze scarcely a penny from him, if you tried that one.”

  “What, then?” El had asked.

  Soames had run one claw-like hand along his jawline, savouring the moment of revelation.

  “What you must do,” he said, “is find the child. Be the child. I know the man well enough to be certain of this: if you present to him a woman, a grown woman, he believes to be his child, he’ll give her - or rather, give us - anything we want, for as long as she asks him to. He’ll empty his pockets and his bank accounts, and he’ll do it with a smile on his face and a song in his heart.”

  Laurel Hopkins studied the printout. Turned it to the side; held it up to her nose, and then far away, assessing it from every angle, every distance.

  “This woman is your daughter?” she asked, when she was finished.

  “I’ve good reason to think so,” Wainwright replied.

  “And forgive me if I’m jumping the gun or presuming too much, but you’re fixin’ to have me find her for you?”

  “If you think you can. It won’t be easy,” he added. “All you’d have to go off is this picture. I couldn’t tell you what name she goes by now, or how she dresses, or where she is - she could be in Timbuktu or Outer Mongolia, for all I know. You ask some people, and they’d tell you that you couldn’t find her no matter how hard you tried, because she’s dead already - that she’s been dead since the night them bastards took her. They’d be wrong, but that’s what they’d tell you.”

  Laurel held up a finger, cutting him off.

  “Wait,” she said, leaping up from her seat with surprising agility. “Wait just one second.”

  She raced across the room, coming to a stop at a cheap, overstuffed wooden magazine rack propped up by her desk. She rifled through its contents and then, with a small hiss of triumph, extracted from it a bundle of paper that was evidently the prize she’d been looking for.

  “Here,” she said, racing back to him and almost throwing the paper into his lap.

  He looked down. It was a newspaper, he saw - that day’s edition, dated September 19th, the banner encased in a wide, garish rainbow and the headline image showing two short-haired, long-limbed women in white vest tops draped languidly around one another.

  “‘The Oakland Girlfriend’,” Wainwright read, examining the paper’s title. “What’s this when it’s at home?”

  “You got a problem with my lifestyle, sir?” Laurel asked, some of the warmth draining from her voice.

  “What?” he answered, flustered. “No! I take people as I find ‘em, me. Couldn’t care less what they get up to in the bedroom, so long as they shut the curtains. But what am I looking at it for?”

  “Inside,” she said. “Page two or three, I think.”

  Wainwright flashed her a look that suggested he was regretting the decisions that had led him to this sofa, this office and this apparently very peculiar woman, but did as he was asked.

  And there it was, a small colour photograph on the inside page, part of a wider two-page spread covering a charity function at one of the fancy art museums people kept telling him he needed to visit - above it a headline, reading YES I AM, SAYS ENGLISH ARISTO.

  And below it, in a photograph
snapped at the auction by a press pass-wielding Karen (and slipped subsequently into the waiting hands of the Oakland Girlfriend’s chief editor, one of Sita’s many very dear friends, with a promise of immediate publication) stood Rose - head tipped back in delighted laughter, arms wrapped intimately around the waist of the beaming, sharp-suited woman who was evidently her date for the evening.

  “Seems to me,” said Laurel, as Wainwright took in what he was seeing, “that if you want to find this daughter of yours, you ain’t got far to go.”

  Chapter 18

  West Hampstead, London

  July 1997

  “I can’t,” Sita had said, back in London, “from all that El has told us, conceive of a single way forward beyond our doing exactly what he asks of us.”

  Karen was the first to break the deep, painful silence that followed this pronouncement.

  “Maybe I’m missing something,” she said, “but what’s to stop us just bunging Soames a load of money and saying it came from Wainwright? He’s not gonna know the difference, not if he’s so sick he can’t even leave the house.”

  “He’d know,” El replied.

  (“You’ll be tempted, I’m sure,” Soames had warned her and Rose, before they’d left him, “to find a way around doing what I’ve… well, let’s say asked you, shall we? But I’d have to advise very firmly against it. Wainwright and I aren’t as close as we were in our confinement, but we do speak. I have his number in San Francisco on speed-dial, and you can tell Mrs Redfearn and the rest of your cabal that I’ll be checking in on him more regularly over the next few months. Making sure that our plans are progressing as they should be.”

  “You can’t just click your fingers and expect us to hop to it,” El had argued. “A job like that takes time. It’s not a question of jumping on a plane tomorrow and sweet-talking him into writing a cheque. You have to lay the groundwork.”

  “You have two months,” Soames had replied, quickly enough that El thought he’d probably had a timeframe in mind for the con from the beginning. “From now until the end of September. Ample time to get the ball rolling, I’d say. And since you bring it up, I ought to add: it won’t only be in America that I’ll be checking up on you. I have friends here too, as you’ve seen. They’ll be keeping an eye on all of you on this side of the pond. Keeping me abreast of how this groundwork is unfolding”).

  “He’s watching us, then?” Ruby asked.

  El nodded.

  “‘Course he is,” Ruby said quietly. “Course he is. He’ll have been doing it a while, an’ all - keeping track of where we go, who we see, what sort of calendars we keep to. It’s what I’d do, if I were him.”

  The room fell silent again, all of them grappling with the implications of this - not so much the being watched as the certainty that Soames would know, and know immediately, if any one of them put so much as a foot out of line.

  “Rose,” Ruby said, emerging from her reverie with a jerk of the head that El recognised as a tell - a sign that something had occurred to her, a new idea or a sudden flash of inspiration, and that she wanted to explore it, to follow the thought to its logical conclusion. “Question for you.”

  “Okay,” Rose answered, guardedly - unsure of what was coming.

  “That sister of yours, Harriet. You see much of her these days?”

  It was a miracle, in El’s opinion, that Rose and Harriet Marchant had managed to cultivate any sort of relationship at all.

  The youngest of their father’s legitimate children, the ones born in wedlock to James Marchant’s widow Elizabeth (who, to the best of El’s knowledge, remained unaware that she was a widow), Harriet was by her own admission an odd duck: solitary, introverted to the point of rudeness and borderline obsessive about her work and the handful of hobbies that orbited it. A social psychologist who lived alone and liked it, she’d learned of Rose’s existence only a few months before, and had introduced herself to her half-sister in the first instance - at El’s kitchen table, early on New Year’s Day - by revealing that she not only knew that Rose and El and the others had killed her father, but approved of what they’d done.

  The bond she and Rose had begun to form thereafter was fragile, but significant to both of them. Harriet, El knew, was one of the very few people who’d been allowed to visit Rose - and eventually, to meet Sophie - in their new penthouse fortress; Rose, in return, had earned a standing invitation to the musty flat on Holloway Road that Harriet shared with her cat, a two-room labyrinth of books, academic journal articles and rock music memorabilia that gave no indication at all that its occupant had a personal net worth rising into the tens of millions.

  What Ruby’s interest in Harriet might be, though, was anyone’s guess.

  “How much do I see her?” Rose replied. “Reasonably often, I suppose. When I can.”

  Ruby scratched thoughtfully at her chin.

  “What would you say,” she asked, “about giving her a quick call? Sort of nowish?”

  Chapter 19

  Presidio Heights, San Francisco

  September 1997

  The morning after Wainwright paid a visit to Laurel Hopkins’ office in the Tenderloin, coming up to 6am Pacific Time, the phone in the hallway of the Presidio Heights house began to ring.

  It was a novelty handset, a hamburger phone with plastic cheese and sesame seed embossing bought by the owners of the property in a moment of whimsy, but the tone was high and clear, carrying upstairs and along the first floor landing at a volume loud enough to rouse El from shallow, still jet-lagged sleep and propel her down the stairs to pick up the receiver.

  Ruby, however, got there first. And seemed, if her daytime clothes and combed, no-longer-ginger hair were any indication, to have been awake for a while.

  “You got it?” she was saying down the line, just as El made it to the gossip bench on which the ill-judged hamburger rested. “Yeah? Alright. You done good, girl. Better than good. Now go and get your feet up and a cup of tea inside you. I’ll give you a bell once I’ve told the rest of ‘em.”

  “Tell us what?” El asked, when she’d hung up the call. “What’s going on?”

  “Do us a favour,” Ruby replied, “and go and wake Rose? Sita an’ all, if you can tear her from her slumber.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Cause it’s time, is why. So get a wiggle on and wake ‘em. If we’re lucky, we can catch Wainwright before he leaves for work.”

  From a rented Ford Taurus parked across the street from the house, in the shade of a Monterey pine, he watched them – infrared binoculars pressed so hard to his eyes they’d leave bruises around the sockets.

  He’d been there all night: tracking them through windows and the gaps in the half-closed blinds as they came and went, moving from living room to kitchen to bathroom and, eventually, to bed.

  She hadn’t slept, though; had stayed curled up on a sofa, reading and making notes on an A4 pad that never left her lap, stopping only to shower and throw back coffee from a cappuccino cup the size of his head as the others fell away, one by one. As if she were waiting for something – for the phone call that, when it came, had her rushing into the hall to answer it.

  In spite of the coffee, he imagined she was exhausted. He was exhausted, for all the thin, bitter American chocolate he’d eaten and the flask of cold, sweet tea he’d worked through to keep himself awake, and he was young and fit by comparison, not some wizened old bag who probably needed a rub-down with a tube of Deep Heat before she could drop off.

  The other old one didn’t sleep much either, he’d noticed in the days and nights he’d been watching – the foreign one with a thing for antiques, so unexpectedly quick and deceptively strong that his balls had ached for a week after she’d kicked him. She’d go upstairs, like the rest of them; make a show of saying goodnight, changing into silk pyjamas or a night gown, dabbing at her face with cold cream and a cotton wool pad. But then, once she was in her bedroom with the door shut, she’d spend hours on the phone, just talking, her
mobile pressed to her ear as she gabbed away – though to who, and about what, he had no idea. It made him wonder whether he ought to have tried harder to bug the house; to have sought out some way of listening in, as well as watching.

  Too late for that now, he supposed.

  He almost felt sorry for the younger ones: the skinny one who’d dyed her hair pink, the one he’d followed to the car show out in Gloucester nearly three months back; the posh bird with the kid and the scar down her arm; the black girl who always seemed to be carrying a screwdriver in her pocket. They weren’t to blame, not really; all they’d done was fall in with her and her mate. But lie down with dogs and you wake up with fleas – wasn’t that what they said?

  And here they were.

  It seemed to be moving forward, that was the main thing – whatever it was they were doing to that bloke with the big moustache, whatever scam it was they were pulling on him. And the further forward it moved, the closer they were to wrapping it up and heading back to London.

  Which was good news for him.

  He’d never been to America before – had never had a passport or been out of the country before – but he’d had hopes, when he got on the plane, of seeing at least a few of the sights he’d heard San Francisco was famous for, in between keeping an eye on her and her crew: Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, the tower from Vertigo. Instead, he’d spent most of the trip with a camera or a telescopic lens glued to his face, stuck in a rental car with no air conditioning that smelled like hot dogs and wet fur, or following the pink-haired woman from one identikit grey building to another in the baking sun until his legs cramped and the soles of his feet blistered.

  He was ready to go home.