The Push (El Gardener Book 2)

by Natalie Edwards

  “But he didn’t know?”

  “Couldn’t have, could he? Or he wouldn’t have done what he done.”

  The problem with the plan Bob had devised, Gillian had pointed out to him, was that it left them effectively penniless. She’d never worked, and didn’t come from money, and as talented a gardener as Bob was, he was never going to bring in the kind of salary that would keep not just both of them but their baby comfortably afloat.

  Fortunately, she’d been thinking, and had come up with a plan of her own.

  “A kidnapping,” Harry said. “Bob’d get a gang together to break in and take the little girl so he could hold her to ransom - get the husband to pay up however much they thought they could get him to shell out to have her back. He’d get one of his lads to do the handover, swap the baby for the pay-out - then, once all the fuss had died down, the wife’d pack a suitcase, wrap the kiddie up in a blanket and jump on the train to London to meet Bob. Who by then would’ve used his share of the ransom money to get things set up for the three of them at this end.”

  “Except there was no ransom money,” Kat said - edging, she thought, close enough to the truth of what had happened now to see its outline, the basic shape of the thing, but not quite close enough that she could name it, not yet. “Or any ransom at all, the way I heard it.”

  “No,” Harry agreed. “They were all set to wait to send it out - forty eight hours was what Bob told me, when he was trying to rope me into it. Forty eight hours to make sure the husband was desperate, then hit him with the ransom note when he was in such a state he’d say yes to anything if it brought the little girl back. But somewhere between them taking her and when they were meant to send out the note, the wife… she changed her mind. Decided she was going to stay with the husband after all.”

  “And Bob… he didn’t like that. Nor did the rest of them, for that matter.”

  An idea - not quite a suspicion, but almost - took hold of Kat.

  “These others, the ones who did the break-in with him,” she asked, with a casualness she hoped would go some way towards disguising how much she wanted to know. “Mates of his, were they? Of Bob’s?”

  Harry raised his eyes to the heavens and crossed himself a second time, his lips moving as he whispered another prayer she couldn’t hear.

  “Not mates,” he answered. “Relatives.”

  He hesitated.

  “‘First remove the beam from your own eye,’” he said, “‘and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’ It’s a good lesson.”

  “Sorry?” said Kat, momentarily regretting her younger incarnation’s decision to abandon Bible school and textual analysis of the Scriptures in favour of Sunday morning TV and a lie-in.

  “It means you shouldn’t judge others. Shouldn’t call out their sins before you’ve looked deep at your own.” He paused again. “But their sin… it’s my sin too, do you see? And I can’t tell you mine, tell you what poison I’ve known and kept hidden all these years, without telling you theirs too.”

  “But Bob’s dead, isn’t he?” she said - not sure anymore if he even remembered she was supposed to be a journalist sniffing out a story, or if the fact of her presence in his flat had transformed her, in his mind, into some sort of mother-confessor. “If it’s his secrets you’ve been protecting… well, there’s no sense in doing it now, is there?”

  His lips moved soundlessly a third time, and she wondered - with a pang of guilt of her own - if he wasn’t just volatile but actually ill; if this compulsive purging of sins was symptomatic of a deeper hyperreligiosity that might itself index some sort of psychotic disorder, and that she’d just happened to appear in the right place at the right time to capitalise on its expression.

  “Not just Bob,” he said eventually. “Stuart, too. He’s… he was my brother. Half-brother, on our Dad’s side. I said no, when Bob asked if I’d help him, but Stu… Stu said yes.”

  “And he’s… not with us?” Kat asked carefully - paranoid now that anything she said might set him off down a potentially frightening path.

  “Congestive heart failure,” he answered, to her relief comparatively calmly. “He went home to the Lord five years ago now.”

  “And the other man - did he… pass away, too?”

  This elicited not the further wince of inner conflict she’d expected, but a peal of laughter, cruel and bitter.

  “Oh, he’s been judged,” he said. “But not by the Lord - that judgement’s still to come for him. He’s doing time, or he was, last I heard. A long stretch, too.”

  The not-quite-suspicion she’d been nurturing exploded into certainty.

  “Is he?” she asked, with such deliberate disinterest that it occurred to her that he might not even register the question.

  “Yeah. Got life for an armed robbery he done back in the ‘70s. If you’d asked me before… asked the man I used to be, I’d have said he didn’t have it in him. But I suppose I never really knew him that well. His Mum and mine were sisters, but she died having him, and it was his Dad who brought him up, out in the East End somewhere. And he was always a peculiar one, Charlie. I never did much care for him.”

  “Soames?” Wainwright had said - torn, El thought, between his own recollections and an unwillingness to believe the worst of a man he’d considered a friend. “Charlie Soames took my Ingrid?”

  “It’s looking that way,” Ruby had replied.

  “And you didn’t think to let me in on this from the beginning, instead of stringing me along like some bloody idiot?”

  “We haven’t known for very long ourselves,” Rose had interjected. “Not for sure. We’ve been waiting for… confirmation, from London.”

  “Besides which,” Ruby had added, “it wouldn’t have been safe to tell you straight off.”

  “What the bloody hell are you talking about, safe?” Wainwright had said, almost shouting in her face as his temper rose again.

  “Safe for us, I should’ve said. He’s had eyes on us since we’ve been here, Soames has. Young El here’s felt it, when she’s been out and about, and I’ve felt something similar myself more than once. We don’t know who he’s sent to do the watching, not for sure, but I know him, and his kind don’t like to leave much to chance. He’ll have rung you an’ all this last fortnight, I expect? Asked how you’re doing, what you’ve been up to?”

  Wainwright’s face had frozen.

  “Twice,” he’d said quietly, after a moment. “Once last week, and once the night before last. Said he’d been worried about me, on my own all the way out here.”

  “And he asked you about El and her magic computer program, I should think?”

  “I brought it up - told him all about it, at that. He was very kind about it - not a bit doubtful like some would’ve been. Said it sounded like the miracle I’d been waiting for.”

  “I’m sure he did. Them calls... they weren’t him seeing about you. They were him checking up on us - making sure we were on the con the way we said we’d be, not straying too far from what we’d told him we’d be doing. And if he’d got so much as an inkling we were going off-piste... Put it this way: the best case scenario would’ve been him sending Interpol after us with a search warrant.”

  Bob Kingsley had kept the child; had raised her as his own.

  “I don’t think he did it to spite Gillian,” Harry said. “That might have been a bit of it, but he really did love that little girl, blood or not. And once he had her, once he’d held her in his arms and convinced himself he’d never have to give her back…”

  “I understand,” said Kat, who didn’t entirely, but suspected it was in her interests to play along with whatever sentiment he expressed.

  “Do you know what she did, afterwards - Gillian?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  “And you know it’s a sin, suicide? A mortal sin?”

  “I’ve heard people say as much,” Kat replied - the half-dormant memory of her father hanging by a rope from an oak tree in
the woods behind their house carving rough grooves at the edges of her voice.

  “A woman who’d do that, who’d spit in the face of God like that… She deserved to be punished. And she’s being punished, now and forever, as Matthew tells us. But what about the ones who drove her to it, and the ones who held their tongues when they should have cried out for justice? What punishment is there for them? For us?”

  Kat didn’t trust herself to speak; to keep her own tongue in check.

  “Stu and Charlie weren’t happy, when they found out Bob wouldn’t be getting them the money he’d promised,” Harry continued, careering away from the possibility of his own eternal damnation and back to concrete historical reality. “Charlie especially. I reckon that’s why Bob tried so hard to get him involved in the little girl’s life - so Charlie’d see what a lovely kid she was, and maybe come to realise for himself that having her around the place was worth more than a fifty grand pay-out.”

  They settled in Harlesden, Bob and the child. With the help of the Kingsleys’ less law-abiding connections, he changed her name, procuring her the necessary paperwork for barely more than a month’s salary - a deal he considered a bargain, for the doors it would open as she aged.

  And they lived together happily enough, as Harry saw it. Until the day Bob went to the doctor with a stomach ache he couldn’t shift and found out shortly after that his little Ingrid - little Lois, as he’d rechristened her, after his own grandmother - would be left without any parent at all before too long.

  “Nobody could work it out, why he asked Charlie of all people to step in and take care of her after he was gone,” Harry said. “But we knew, me and Stu. Because who else could he have trusted to keep her hidden from her real dad, if he ever came looking for her?”

  “He must not have known what to think, the first time they stuck you in that cell with him in Hendon,” Ruby had told Wainwright. “I mean, what are the odds of it? Of the bloke whose kid he snatched all them years ago, whose kid he’d been grooming to be his child-bride or what have you almost all her life, just rocking up in the bunk above his? About a million to one, I reckon.”

  Wainwright’s anger had begun to dissipate by then, his indignation replaced by the queasy dawning realisation that what he was hearing was, very likely, something like the truth.

  “I expect he was lying there one night listening to you talk away above him, and he had the idea of how he could use what he knew to fleece you - perhaps when you told him how much you’d spent on private detectives, and he got a sense that you’d shell out a hundred times that making up for lost time with your Ingrid, if you could just see her again. And he’d have been sure there was no danger of the real Ingrid showing up and spoiling things, wouldn’t he? ‘Cause he knew exactly where she was. And better than that: he had her so far under his thumb, she’d hardly dare go to the bathroom without his say-so.”

  “We know he’d been turning over what I done to him, and how he was gonna get back at me if he ever got out. I doubt it took much to get him thinking on how he’d put both of them things together - how he’d use me to get to you. Use us."

  They hadn’t told him what dirt Soames had on them, and how he’d happened to come upon it; what leverage, exactly. And Wainwright hadn’t asked.

  But it was, El had considered later, the one loose end they hadn’t managed to tie up; the one question to which no obvious answer had presented itself. Because despite everything else they knew, despite everything Ruby and Dexter and Kat and Harriet had been able to uncover - they still had no idea at all how Soames had known what he’d known about the death of James Marchant. Or who, more specifically, had been the one to tell him.

  Chapter 29

  Herne Bay, Kent

  October 1997

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is,” El told Soames, still smiling, “getting a woman like Ruby to stay in bed? She can’t stand being sick, even when she is sick, so persuading her to lie there like the English Patient until your son caught sight of her through his binoculars and decided she was weak enough for him to make his move…”

  “Was rather an ordeal,” Sita concluded, smiling back at her.

  “And you’re sure he’s watching, are you?” Ruby had asked Sita earlier that morning.

  “Absolutely certain,” Sita had replied, tucking her into the duvet and plumping the pile of pillows behind her. “You’d see for yourself, if you looked. He’s directly across the road, on the roof of that monstrous building site your council seems to have abandoned to the elements.”

  “It’s not like we ain’t complained,” Ruby responded, half-heartedly. “Michael rang up someone at Environmental Health the other week, but they kept fobbing him off.”

  “Are you sure about this, Mum?” Dexter had said, apprehensively. “What if this Jay changes his mind, or decides he’d rather throw a petrol bomb through the window? What if Soames has someone else on hand for the break-in, and the son’s just there to stand guard?”

  Ruby had beckoned him closer, patting the unoccupied side of the bed until he sat down beside her.

  “I know you’re worried,” she’d told him, taking his hand. “But you got to trust me, alright? It’ll be him that does it, this Jay – Soames has had him doing his running ‘round for him from the get-go. And much as the boy might want to chuck a Molotov cocktail through the letterbox, he ain’t going to. Soames’ll want it done up close and personal. He’ll want me to know about it, when it’s happening.”

  “As to the timing, darling,” Sita had said, “I’ll concede that there’s a degree of guesswork involved on our part. But it’s educated guesswork, not a blind shot in the dark. Soames is a sadist; we’ve all seen as much. He likes to dominate. It won’t be enough for him to simply have your mother removed from the equation. He’ll want the rest of us to know about it when he does. He’ll want to see our reactions, when he tells us what he’s done. And since he’s insisted that we visit him today, this morning no less, I find it difficult to imagine that he won’t be taking the opportunity to tell us all about what he’s done - or what he believes he’s done. If only to see the looks on our faces, as he’s bragging about it.”

  “You listen to your Auntie Sita,” Ruby had said, not loosening her grip on Dexter’s hand. “I might do her head in sometimes, but she ain’t about to offer me up for sacrifice.”

  “Not today, at any rate,” Sita had added. “And I can assure you, there’ll be something far better than this in it for me, if I ever do.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Soames demanded - tendrils of unease wrapping around the words as he spoke them.

  “Ruby - she’s not dead,” El told him. “Not even close. Your son’s with her now, in fact - having a cup of tea with her in her kitchen, was the last I heard. Your wife’s there, too.”

  “She took none too kindly to the revelation of her parentage,” Sita said. “Nor to the realisation that her husband and the man she’d long assumed to be her father had conspired all her life to keep her from discovering that parentage. Nor, I would add, to learning that that same husband had recruited their only son to commit murder on his behalf. Though I can’t think why.”

  El had been prepared for him to shout, to scream bloody murder at them. But he didn’t.

  Instead, he began to laugh - a dry, corrosive rattle that rose up from his chest like the grind of rusted gears and left him gasping for breath.

  “Will you be letting us in the joke?” Rose asked him, the high-handed timbre of her voice at odds with her body language - the clench of her teeth and the anxious, erratic scratching at her wrist.

  “I’m sorry,” he wheezed, pulling on his oxygen and wiping at his spittle-flecked mouth. “I’m just finding it rather funny that you seem to think you’ve pulled one over on me, somehow.”

  Rose shot her a look of frightened incomprehension. Sita seemed barely to react at all.

  In another time and place, El might have been impressed by her stoicism.

&nb
sp; “There’ll be some small degree of inconvenience,” he said, “if you really have succeeded in turning Lois against me - although I shouldn’t take even that for granted, if I were you. We’ve been together a very long time, as you know yourselves. And my idiot son may have shown himself to have less courage and fewer of the little grey cells than that bum-boy Jared out there – though I can’t say even that surprises me immensely, he never was Brain of Britain. But inconvenience will be the worst of it, you see. There’ll be no other adverse consequences - at least, not for me. Good as it may have made you feel to solve the mystery of the Wainwright baby and snatch your Mrs Redfearn from the jaws of death, it hasn’t served your cause well in the slightest. I still know what you did to James Marchant, the six of you - or had you forgotten? All this conversation has done is suggest that it might be preferable for me to see you in prison for it, rather than out in the world plotting my downfall.”

  Sita’s lips twitched.

  “You intend to call the police?” she asked.

  El thought she caught something, beyond the conservatory: the sound of a heavy door, opening and closing; the whisper of voices echoing faintly along the hallway.

  “I do,” Soames replied, seeming not to hear them.

  Another door opened, this one closer by, and then Karen was standing in the conservatory doorway – hemmed in on one side by a cowed-looking Jared, and on the other by an older white man with a bald, egg-like head whom Dexter, had he seen him, would have been surprised to recognise as Gerry The Eagle, Gary Hartwood’s long-suffering business manager.

  “And the cavalry arrives,” Sita said.

  The bald man stepped forward, not stopping until he loomed directly over Soames in his chair.

  “Charles Soames?” he asked.

  Soames stared up at him mutely, not comprehending.