Lois saw it, Harriet believed; saw it, and knew - however much she hadn’t wanted to know - that at least a part of the far-fetched tale Harriet had told was true.
He saw it, too: his caterpillar eyebrows knitting and his lower lip beginning to tremble under his thick grey moustache as he looked at her through the doorway, as he took in the worry-lines etched into her cheeks and forehead, the bones threatening to break through the surface of her skin.
“Lois,” Harriet had said, when she’d judged it appropriate, “this is Ted. Ted, this is Lois. Your daughter.”
“What?” Jay spluttered, peeling his mother’s palm away from his face with his uninjured hand. “Why would you say that?”
“He’s your Dad,” Lois said softly. “And he’ll always be your Dad. But he ain’t who you think he is, Jay. He ain’t who either of us thought he was. What he’s done, what he’s kept from us…”
She broke off, apparently struggling to find the words to encapsulate the sentiment, much less the explanation driving it.
Jay’s expression flickered from anger to puzzlement and back again - a textbook illustration of conflicted.
“Stop saying that!” he shouted, pushing her away so hard she fell back against the doorframe. “Stop fucking saying that! What sort of wife are you, saying that about your own husband?”
Now Redfearn spoke; now she intervened.
“You’re upset,” she told him, “and I get that. It ain’t easy to hear, what your Mum’s trying to tell you. But you’re in my house, son. My house. And I don’t hold with people laying hands on each other under my roof. So if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go on over there and help her up before I remember that I seen you put her down there, and you’ll do it now.”
“Or what?” he snarled, curling his fist. “You’ll hit me with a kettle again?”
“Leave it, Jay!” Lois begged him, pulling herself to her feet. “Please, just leave it!”
“You’re defending her now, over me? Her who had my Dad locked up?”
“Calm down, son,” said Ruby, evenly. “You just calm down.”
“Shut it!” he yelled. “You don’t get to speak, after what you did! You don’t get to fucking speak!”
“Maybe I should defend her, at that!” cried Lois, almost screaming to be heard. “‘Cause I’m glad he went down! He deserved to go down, after what he did!”
“What does that mean, what he did?” Jay screamed back at her, his head swinging left and right like the tail of a caged tiger. “What is it he’s meant to have done?”
“He took me!” she bawled, her voice so raw Harriet wondered if her vocal cords had torn. “He took me, him and his mate and the man who called himself my Dad. Shut me away, so I wouldn’t know no better than what he did or the things he said to me. Wouldn’t know right from wrong. You want to talk about people robbing people of their lives, Jay? Then you look at me. You have a good look. ‘Cause your Dad, he robbed mine.”
Chapter 28
Pacific Avenue, San Francisco
September 1997
El had never done anything like this before; never even come close.
The very thought of it had made her nervous. Very nervous.
“If this goes bad,” she’d said, “we’re going to end up inside. And not Holloway, either. It’ll be some state prison out in the desert with open dormitories and guards with machine guns in the watchtower. You do realise that, don’t you?”
“Been watching too many documentaries, you have,” Ruby had told her, more amused than El would have expected given their situation. “And it ain’t going to go bad. When are you lot gonna learn to trust me?”
Even Rose, whose apprehension had rendered her mute for the entirety of their walk to Pacific Heights, had rolled her eyes at that one.
“It’ll all come right,” Ruby had said, as they’d made their way through the unlocked gates and up to the entrance of the mansion proper. “You wait and see.”
“Are you sure you’re okay to do this?” El had asked Rose, placing a reassuring hand - almost before she was aware that she’d done it - in the small of the other woman’s back as Ruby grabbed and then released the roaring lion’s head ornament that served as a door knocker, sending low vibrations racing through the heavy wood of the door.
“Not remotely,” Rose had replied - leaning, or so El had thought, very lightly into the touch.
Wainwright’s expression, on encountering the three of them waiting under the Grecian canopy of his porch-way, had run exactly the gamut of emotions that Ruby had anticipated they would: surprise, at seeing the woman he’d met as Laurel Hopkins appear unannounced so early in the day; surprise and confusion, at seeing El with her, and finally, on seeing Rose, a sort of wary, parched-mouthed yearning that had struck El like a punch to the solar plexus.
He hadn’t said a word.
Rose would do the talking first; that was the plan. Anything else would seem to Wainwright, then or later, either the revelation of an earlier lie or its continuation into the present. Everything he knew as far as they were concerned, Ruby had reminded them - though El, at least, had needed no reminding - had been part of the con: how they looked, the way they spoke, what they wanted with him.
And from here on out, as they’d agreed way back in London, there wouldn’t be a con.
Hereafter, what they’d tell him would be nothing but the truth.
“Good morning, Mr Wainwright,” Rose had begun, haltingly. “I know this must seem very strange, but do you think we might come in?”
He’d let them in, of course. And let them speak.
For a time, when Ruby was speaking - in her own voice, the voice that had shocked him so completely when she’d first unleashed it in the high-ceilinged sitting room he’d shown them into - El had thought he might do more than that: that he’d shout, or throw a plate, or come at them with a handgun or one of the decorative swords hanging from the walls of the entrance hall.
But instead, he’d sat quietly and listened, until Ruby was done.
“And what makes you think,” he’d said, when she was finished, “that I won’t get straight on the phone to the police and have the three of you took away in handcuffs, now you’ve told me all that?”
That’s the question, isn’t it? El had thought. Why wouldn’t you?
“Because we know, do you see?” Ruby had told him. “We know where she is, your Ingrid. And we can take you to her.”
Going back to London after all that time up north, Kat had told El, had been a relief she hadn’t felt since the day she’d traded sex work in South Wales for drama school and a waitressing job in Bloomsbury.
The London branch of the Kingsley clan, Dexter had told her - once she’d fed back Lucille Salter’s bit of intel, and left him to work whatever magic it was that he worked on his local authority contacts - was scattered mostly across the north west of the city, in and around the unlovely suburbs of Dollis Hill and Neasden, Wembley Park and Kenton. They were, he warned her, fewer than they had been, their numbers diminished by the deaths, chronic illnesses and unexpected emigrations that had beset them since the ‘60s. Of the remaining London Kingsleys, only two were old enough to remember Bob Kingsley - an aunt, now into her nineties and in the early stages of dementia, and another cousin, two and a half decades younger and, Kat hoped, with somewhat better recall.
The cousin, Harry, was a retired bricklayer, twice divorced and living, for the time being, in a rental flat in Kingsbury after declaring bankruptcy the year before. It was his financial situation more than anything else that persuaded Kat to readopt her journalist persona when she approached him, this time minus the Scouse accent Lucille Salter had found so unconvincing; if he really was as skint as he sounded, she reasoned, then a few hundred quid from a woman he’d never have to see again in exchange for a bit of dirt on a long-buried relative he probably hadn’t even been that close to in the first place would probably strike him as a pretty sweet deal.
What she hadn’t
seen coming was the religion.
The inside of his flat - the flat he’d invited her into so readily that she worried at first he might be a serial killer on the lookout for his next victim - was a cramped mess of pan-denominational Christian paraphernalia: prayer beads and crucifixes, King James Bibles and Books of Common Prayer, embroidered aphorisms in cheap plastic frames and poster-sized reproductions of the face of Jesus. Most disturbingly, and doing little to dispel her serial killer anxieties, there was a font of water - holy water, she assumed - by the front door: a white resin basin in the shape of a cherub into which he dipped his fingers as he re-entered the hallway, spritzing himself with the liquid as he showed her to the living room.
“Are you a follower of Christ?” he said, offering her the remaining water on his fingertips as easily as another host might ask if he could tempt her to a chocolate digestive.
Best fudge it a bit, she’d thought. Get him on side.
“Methodist,” she told him, hoping like hell he wouldn’t start quizzing her on John Wesley or the nuances of low church liturgy.
He nodded.
“Bet you were brought up in the Church, weren’t you?” he asked.
“I was, yeah,” she replied. If that’s what you call two funerals and getting dragged to the Midnight Mass at Christmas, she added silently.
“Not me,” he said sadly. “We didn’t have none of that at home when I was growing up. Weren’t ’til late last year that I came to God.”
Ah, she thought, light dawning. A convert. A late-life convert, no less. No wonder he’s getting so extreme with it.
“I was wondering,” she began, hoping to steer him away from God, “if I could ask you a few questions about Bob - your cousin? I’m putting together a story on the abduction of a little girl in Harrogate in 1955, and Bob’s name came up in conversation with a couple of the people I’ve been speaking to…”
It was intended as an opener - nothing more. She hadn’t meant it to sound accusatory, or even mysteriously ambiguous. But she might as well, from the reaction it elicited, have accused him of taking the child himself.
“Oh, God,” he said, taking his crumpling face in his hands. “You know, don’t you? You know.”
“You’ve seen her?” Wainwright had asked - the tiniest green shoots of the hope El had just seen crushed under the wheels of a steamroller springing to life again. “You’ve seen my Ingrid?”
“Not personally,” Ruby had conceded. “It was my husband that met her, a long time ago. But we got someone with her now - a friend. Someone who wants to help her. Her and your grandson both.”
Wainwright had gasped, losing his breath at the word grandson.
He’d remarried after his first wife died, El had recalled. But he’d never had kids; probably never let himself consider the possibility he might ever be someone’s grandfather.
“How do I know that’s so?” he’d said, reigning himself in - remembering who he was speaking to. “How am I supposed to know that any of it is? You’ve told me nothing but a pack of lies up ’til now.”
“If it’s concrete proof you’re after,” Ruby had told him, “then you ain’t gonna get it, not while you’re all the way out here. I daresay you can get a load of blood tests ordered once you’re back home, for her and you, and they’ll tell you everything you want to know. But in the meantime, I reckon you’ll have to take us at our word.”
“You’ll have to pardon me for saying so - Ruby, was it? - but I trust your word about as far as I could throw it.”
That’s it, then, El had told herself. It’s over. Alcatraz, here we come.
Ruby had paused; scratched at her chin, apparently deep in thought.
“It’s funny,” she’d said. “Something occurred to me, when we was on the way over here. I didn’t mention it to the girls, ‘cause, you know… when you get to our age, not every thought you have is worth sharing, is it? But it had occurred to me, before, that you might need a bit more convincing than what we can give you. And that got me thinking that there could be something I could show you, at that. Well… perhaps not show you. More like: help you recollect what you knew already, but you might not’ve known you knew. If you see what I mean.”
I don’t, El had thought. So how the hell is he supposed to?
“I don’t follow,” Wainwright had said.
“No, I expect you don’t. So instead of me telling you, how about I ask you something instead. You remember it well, do you, the night your little one got took?”
“I don’t believe I’ll bother answering that,” he'd replied, anger flushing his red cheeks redder still.
“Right enough. I’m not sure I would, either, in your place. But I’d ask you this: do you happen to remember what they sounded like, them men that took her? When they were tying you up and hitting you, you and your wife?”
Wainwright didn’t answer immediately.
He’s playing it back, El had thought, watching his expression as he sifted through whatever impressions he’d been left with of that night, after he took a blow to the head. He’s trying to remember - not just go back over what he told the police when it happened, or what he’s been telling himself happened ever since, but really remember.
He’s trying to relive it.
“It was only two of ‘em that spoke,” Wainwright had said distantly. “I didn’t think much on it at the time, but I expect you want to tell me it was ‘cause of who the other one was. That it were Bob Kingsley under that ski-mask, and he didn’t want me recognising his voice.”
Ruby had nodded.
“I’d say it probably was, an’ all,” she’d told him. “But it was the other two I was thinking of. One of ‘em sounded different from the other, did he? Bit younger, maybe?”
Wainwright closed his eyes, apparently pushing himself to remember.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “He did, now you say it. Never struck me before, but… yeah. Younger. Like his voice had barely broke.”
“It weren’t just that, though, was it?” Ruby had pressed. “There was something else, weren’t there? Something else about his voice, the young one.”
There’d been another pause; another sharp intake of breath.
“Yeah,” Wainwright had said, barely whispering. “There was, at that.”
“Could have been it sounded different then than it does now. More pronounced. I expect that’s why you didn’t see it sooner - didn’t put two and two together, even while you were inside. But he had a lisp, didn’t he, the younger one? Just like Charlie Soames.”
It was guilt, Kat thought: a reservoir of it, bubbling just below the surface of the man’s mind like pus gathering at the head of a boil. Whether it was new guilt, brought on by his religious conversion, or old guilt, festering for decades, maybe even the reason for his conversion - that, she couldn’t say. But however long it had lain there, dormant, it was spilling over now, at only the slightest provocation - the confession dislodging itself from his imperilled soul with the propulsive force of a volcano.
“I didn’t go with ‘em,” he said, still holding his head in his hands. “Bob asked me, he did, but by Almighty God I swear, I told him no. He had the idea in his head that it’d go easier with four of us. But I told him no. I’ll be the first to say I wasn’t a good man then, before I was received into His grace. I lied, and I stole, and I cheated. I didn’t know any better, although that’s no excuse, I know. But as much of a sinner as I was, even I had standards. And snatching a little baby from the arms of its mother… it was too much. Too much to ask.”
The story as Harry Kingsley told it was fractured, nonlinear - the guilt and his apparently boundless capacity for proselytising sending him off down any number of rabbit-holes and digressions. But Kat’s eventual understanding of what had happened before, during and then after the incident at the Wainwright house in 1955 was this:
Bob Kingsley had been having an affair with the wife of his wealthy employer up in Harrogate - a young girl, Gillian. And not just a fling, Harr
y had been keen to emphasise - no, Bob was in love with her. Wanted her to leave the husband and move down to London with him so the pair of them could shack up together somewhere nobody would notice or care that they were living in sin - but with his Dad’s side of the family on hand, if they needed them.
When the wife fell pregnant, unexpectedly - with a baby she assured Bob had to be his, during the pregnancy and then after, once the girl was born - Bob sprang into action: putting into motion the beginnings of a plan that would end, as he saw it, with the two of them and their child safely ensconced in Northwick Park or Stanmore, away from the extensive reach of the cuckolded husband.
“Poor sod,” Harry said - then slapped a hand over his mouth in shame, mortified by his momentary lapse into un-Christian language.
“Why?” Kat asked.
Harry muttered something that Kat took to be a prayer and crossed himself before continuing.
“I assumed he knew - that Bob did. We knew, ‘round here - his Dad’d told my Mum, I expect in confidence, but she wasn’t exactly one to keep a bit of gossip to herself when she heard it, so it did the rounds of all of us lot before we even knew what to make of what she was telling us. But his Mum must not have told him. Must’ve thought it was, you know… not something you said to your son, if you wanted him to grow up feeling like a man.”
“Told him what?”
Harry shuffled awkwardly in his chair.
“He’d had an infection, when he was little. Too little to remember. In his, you know… Down there.”
He gestured, mortified again, to his own crotch.
“He was infertile?” Kat asked.
“That was how we heard it. You be careful what you do with that thing of yours, or you’ll end up like your cousin Bobby - that was what my Mum used to tell us.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 23