Sisters Three

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘Well, here she is,’ Ed Harker said. ‘All yours.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ Dominic said. ‘I haven’t agreed to take her on yet.’

  ‘Oh, but you will, son,’ Ed Harker said. ‘You got no choice, really.’

  ‘I’m not ten years old and this isn’t Philadelphia,’ Dominic said. ‘You can’t breeze in off the Yankee Clipper and tell me what to do. I’m under no obligation to you, Harker, or to you, Miss – Miss Weston.’

  ‘Call me Penny,’ the girl said.

  ‘How about I remind you that she’s just escaped from a country where girls like her are being herded into trucks and sent to keep the troops amused,’ Harker said. ‘You read the newspapers, don’t you? Even the Scottish papers must…’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Dominic interrupted. ‘I don’t swallow any of that propaganda claptrap and I’m not going to be taken in by some sob story about how she’s my niece or my cousin or my half sister.’

  ‘You told me Saturday you understood the situation,’ Harker said.

  ‘Sure, the old man cabled me and told me the score,’ Dominic said. ‘But that doesn’t mean to say I’m falling for your cock-and-bull stories about persecution.’

  ‘Do you not want to help your papa?’ the girl asked.

  Dominic ignored her. He turned from the windows and looked around. The suite had two doors, apart from the door to the corridor. One led to the bathroom, the other to the bedroom. He noted the double bed’s rumpled sheets.

  ‘Ain’t nobody hiding in there,’ Harker said. ‘It’s too early for Santa Claus.’

  The girl uncrossed her legs and drew them up. She looked as angular as an antelope but not awkward or ungainly. She spoke English with just the trace of an accent. He had met her only briefly at the racetrack on Saturday and hadn’t yet figured out where John Flint fitted into the picture, or if Flint was involved at all.

  He said, ‘Who’s paying for all this?’

  ‘You are,’ Ed Harker said.

  When he grinned the massive brown moustache rose to expose a twisted scar on his upper lip. He was even more ebullient than he had been at the weekend, cockier and more sure of himself too.

  ‘He wants to hear about the money, Ed,’ the girl said. ‘It’s the money not me that is the problem for Dominic.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Dominic said. ‘Don’t kid yourself: you are the problem. I’ll get around to talking about the other thing once I’ve decided what I’m going to do with you.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Harker said. ‘Don’t you trust your own father?’

  ‘I haven’t seen my own father since I was ten years old.’

  ‘It is therefore understandable that you are cautious,’ the girl said. ‘It pays us all to be cautious, does it not?’

  ‘Look,’ Ed Harker said, ‘take off your coat and park yourself and we’ll thrash out the deal. Penny’s right – you’re entitled to be cagey.’

  ‘I want you to tell me in words of one syllable why I should take responsibility for this young woman and, while we’re at it, just what she has to do with the Manones.’

  ‘I go with the money,’ the girl said.

  ‘I can figure the money side of it.’ Dominic addressed her directly. ‘I can see what’s in it for me but…’

  ‘More than you can possibly imagine,’ the girl put in.

  ‘But I can’t figure how you got to be part of the deal. I’m quite capable of setting up the sort of organisation my father needs without some kid peeking over my shoulder all the time.’

  ‘Have you done a similar thing before?’ the girl asked.

  She was smart, Dominic decided, smarter than Harker. He knew Harker, the type at least. There was something depressingly familiar about Harker in spite of his gaudy clothes and Americanised drawl. Take him out of the turkey-red sweater and tight pants, Dominic decided, and you could put him down in Govan Road and he’d hardly be noticed. The girl on the other hand had no natural protection. Drape her in an old shawl, wrap a cheap cotton skirt about her and she’d still stick out like a sore thumb.

  He knew why it had become necessary to get her out of Vienna but he couldn’t understand why his father had shipped her to Scotland. She wasn’t a blood relative, wasn’t even Italian. Unless he missed his guess she was Jewish, a young Austrian Jew who had fled flag-waving, kow-towing Vienna soon after Hitler’s storm troopers had marched into the city.

  ‘Have you?’ the girl repeated. ‘Can you handle something this big?’

  Harker laughed. ‘Sure, he can. Carlo wouldn’t have sent you here if Glasgow hadn’t been the right place and Dominic the right guy for the job.’

  ‘I would like to hear him say that I am welcome,’ the girl said.

  Dominic noticed that she avoided making eye contact with Harker. He wondered if she was ashamed of having to share a bed with a man old enough to be her father, wondered too if his father, Carlo Manone, knew about the sleeping arrangements or if that was something that Harker had negotiated on his own.

  ‘I’m not going to send you back to Austria, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Say that I am welcome and I will show you what I have brought you.’

  ‘All right,’ Dominic said flatly. ‘You’re welcome.’

  She unfolded herself from the sofa. She was taller than he was but somehow he didn’t mind. He stepped aside as she strode across the room. Grinning again, Harker pushed the bedroom door wide open and after she’d gone into the bedroom closed it behind her.

  ‘You won’t be so shy when you see what she’s brought,’ he said.

  ‘Shy? I’m not shy.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you certainly ain’t what I expected. I thought you’d grow up different. More like your old man.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Dominic said.

  ‘I mean, you’re a surly wee begger, ain’t you?’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Giving that poor lassie such a hard time.’

  ‘What do you do for my father in Philadelphia?’

  ‘Lots of things,’ said Harker.

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘I ran numbers for a while.’

  ‘What else?’ said Dominic.

  ‘I kept your brother out of trouble.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘Trouble with the law, trouble with the union bosses.’

  ‘The unions?’ Dominic said. ‘On the docks?’

  ‘Sure, on the docks,’ said Harker. ‘In the shipyards, the refinery too. We had a lot of trouble at the refinery one time.’

  ‘You were a professional strike breaker, I take it.’

  ‘I did what you do, son: I organised.’

  ‘Why has my father never mentioned you in his letters?’

  ‘No reason to mention me, was there?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Dominic conceded for this was neither the time nor the place to test Edgar Harker’s knowledge of the inner workings of the family business on the Delaware.

  He watched the bedroom door, awaiting the girl’s return.

  ‘Fancy her, do you?’ Harker said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be human, you didn’t fancy her.’

  ‘I’m a married man,’ Dominic said, stiffly, ‘a happily married man.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Aren’t you married?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘I know,’ Harker said. ‘You married Polly Conway and you’ve two kids, Stuart and Ishbel. See, I done my homework before I left Philly.’

  The bedroom door opened again and the girl emerged carrying an oblong cardboard box. She walked to the coffee table in the centre of the room and placed the box upon it. She lifted off the lid of the box and extracted several layers of white tissue paper and soft cloth padding. She put the packing carefully to one side, sank down on her knees, lifted out the plates and placed them on the flannel then, leaning to one side, beckoned to Dominic.

  The plates were of fine
steel fixed to thin strips of lead backed by thick wooden blocks. They were obviously heavy, like little ingots. The girl used both hands to lift one. She tilted it against the light so that Dominic could see the tooling.

  ‘Beautiful, is it not?’ the girl said.

  ‘How does it print?’ said Dominic.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Do you have samples?’

  ‘Only on rough paper.’

  ‘Where do we get the right paper?’ Dominic said.

  ‘We have a contact in Verona?’

  ‘Your uncle,’ said Harker. ‘Old Guido.’

  ‘Guido isn’t in Verona?’

  ‘He is now,’ said Harker.

  ‘I thought he’d retired,’ said Dominic. ‘He’s an old man, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Old men have their uses too,’ the girl said. ‘Look at the reverse.’

  She held up the second plate and offered it to Dominic. The surface had been treated with a light film of wax. He balanced the block on the tips of his fingers to avoid contaminating the engraving. He would have preferred not to handle the plates at all but it was too late for that sort of caution. He had never seen let alone handled a counterfeit plate before. Three years ago he had shifted a crate of forged banknotes, though, had filtered them down through the Unione to finance a shipment of side arms from an agent in Sicily, arms that had probably wound up in the hands of Spanish guerrillas.

  He felt oddly stimulated just holding the plate in a hotel room with a beautiful Jewish girl from Vienna looking up at him. So far life had been easy, almost routine, but now his father had thrust him into something much more dangerous than managing a few shady sidelines in the back streets of Glasgow. He glanced down at the girl’s long waist and rounded hips, at her helmet of blonde hair. She, not Harker, was the key to the deal, though whether he would like the deal when it came right down to it was another matter.

  He gave her back the plate, offered his hand and drew her to her feet. He peeled off his overcoat, tossed it to Harker then seated himself squarely on the sofa and looked up at the girl.

  ‘All right, Miss Weston,’ he said. ‘Tell me exactly what you need to get started.’

  * * *

  ‘A house?’ Bernard said. ‘What sort of a house?’

  ‘Four or five large bedrooms. Detached.’

  ‘Here in Breslin?’

  ‘In the neighbourhood,’ said Dominic. ‘Outside the city.’

  ‘To buy?’

  ‘To rent.’

  ‘Long term?’

  ‘A year at least, maybe longer.’

  ‘I don’t know if we have anything right now. Perhaps Mr Shakespeare…’

  ‘Forget Allan Shakespeare,’ Dominic said. ‘I want you to handle the transaction, Bernard, and keep very, very quiet about it.’

  ‘I see,’ Bernard said. ‘I take it this house is not for Polly?’

  ‘No, for a friend.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bernard again.

  The Dolomite was parked outside the office but there was no sign of Tony Lombard. Dominic had driven himself across the river, out through sprawling garden suburbs and over the Switchback, past farms and fruit orchards into the region of mansions and villas that formed the communities of Bearsden, Mugdock and Breslin. The fact that his boss had come calling on a cold, grey November afternoon indicated that something unusual was going on and Bernard began to suspect that the telephone call that had summoned Allan Shakespeare to a ‘showing’ that afternoon was more than just coincidence.

  He knew just the sort of property that Dominic required for his ‘friend’, not a nice cheap little hideaway but something expensive and discreet. He regretted that Dominic had involved him in the deception. From now on he would be obliged to lie whenever someone in the family praised Dominic for his devotion to Polly and the children. He stepped behind the counter, pulled open a drawer, slid out a ledger and slapped it down on the counter.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dominic asked.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

  ‘You’re mad at me.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ said Bernard, grimly.

  ‘You think it’s for a woman, don’t you?’

  ‘None of my business who it’s for.’

  ‘Well, it is for a woman.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘It isn’t what you think, though.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me, sir.’

  ‘Come off it,’ Dominic said. ‘You’re as transparent as a pane of glass. It’s a woman who’ll be living in the house but not, let me emphasise, my woman. I’m only telling you this because you’ll be handling the transaction and I’ve got to trust you not to tell anyone about it. When you see the girl you’re going to assume I’ve lied to you because she’s a peach – but she isn’t my peach, Bernard, just remember that.’

  ‘She is your responsibility, however?’

  ‘That’s it, that’s all.’

  ‘Blackstone Farm.’

  ‘Hah!’ Dominic said. ‘Of course. We bought the whole site, didn’t we?’

  ‘You did,’ Bernard said. ‘At least Bonskeet’s Builders did. You should keep a closer eye on your holdings, Dominic, and you wouldn’t have to ask for my help. I take it you’ve never been out to the Blackstone site?’

  ‘To the farmhouse? No, I’ve never been there.’

  ‘It’s a far cry from a thatched cottage,’ Bernard said. ‘It’s a two-storey dwelling in finished brick. All mod cons. Been empty for half a year simply because nobody’s keen to stump up for a farmhouse on the edge of a new estate.’

  ‘It isn’t an investment. I don’t want to buy it.’

  ‘You don’t have to buy it,’ Bernard said. ‘All I have to do is tell the Bard that you dropped in, checked the ledger and suggested we might do better to lease the damned place than have it standing empty. I’ll draft an agreement, have your female friend sign it and attach a separate page with your name as guarantor. Your bank will send us a cheque every month and none of it need show in the ledger.’

  ‘What about Shakespeare?’

  ‘He has his own private files: I have mine.’

  ‘Do you now?’ said Dominic.

  ‘Well, I will have when I do this for you.’

  ‘How far off the beaten track is Blackstone Farm?’ Dominic asked.

  ‘Half a mile from Roman Road, give or take. It’s level track, if a little on the rough side. The building site is a good half-mile to the west so there won’t be a problem of disturbance, not for a while. In fact, if there’s a war…’

  ‘There won’t be a war,’ said Dominic.

  ‘Won’t there?’ said Bernard. ‘Been in touch with Adolf, have you?’

  ‘Chamberlain will make sure that the agreement with Hitler stands up,’ Dominic said. ‘Don’t you believe in peace in our time, Bernard?’

  ‘Experience has taught me not to put much faith in paper promises,’ Bernard said. ‘Experience also suggests that it might not be too long before the blackshirts are measuring noses in Argyll Street.’

  ‘At least you’ll have nothing to worry about,’ Dominic said.

  ‘No, but I’m not a Semite.’

  ‘My friend is,’ Dominic said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘My friend – your new client – is a Jew.’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘Does that make a difference?’

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ Bernard said. ‘Does she have family?’

  ‘She came on her own?’

  ‘Came,’ said Bernard, ‘from where?’

  ‘You’re asking too many questions.’

  ‘Is that why you want some place quiet for her, because she’s a Jew?’

  ‘Far too many questions.’ Dominic leaned on the counter and inspected the entry in the property ledger. ‘As far as anyone’s concerned Miss Weston is an American. She has all the necessary papers to prove citizenship in the land of the free and her accent – she does have a slight accent –
won’t matter because if any of the locals get too curious she’ll tell them her father is Dutch.’

  ‘She’s a young woman, you say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s going to find it pretty damned quiet up at Blackstone.’

  ‘Peace and quiet will suit her,’ Dominic said. ‘Is this place furnished?’

  ‘Partly,’ said Bernard. ‘Scrappy stuff. You’ll have to dig about in your warehouse to find her something to sleep on.’

  ‘Can we go see it?’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’ll mean closing the office.’

  ‘Then do so,’ Dominic said.

  * * *

  It had been a long day for Lizzie. Splashing about with suds and boiling water in the wash-house at the bottom of the garden was quite satisfying but wet clothes were impossible to dry on the outdoor lines in winter and she’d had to lug the clothes into the kitchen, screw the mangle to the side of the sink and wring out each garment individually. She’d worked for so many years in a hospital laundry, however, that domestic wash-days seemed easy by comparison.

  She finished about half-past four, hung sheets and shirts on a pulley in the kitchen, stockings and underwear on a rack in the living-room. She would remove the rack before Bernard arrived at a quarter past six for Lizzie belonged to the traditional school of housewives who believed that the breadwinner should come home to a neat and tidy house with a piping hot meal on the table. Lizzie, in a clean frock and apron, would be waiting to give her husband a kiss at the door and Rosalind would arrive ten or fifteen minutes later and then they would sit down together and, as Bernard put it, break bread.

  That evening, however, Rosie arrived before her stepfather.

  She slipped straight into her bedroom and did not come out again.

  Lizzie reckoned that she would by lying on the bed with her ‘good ear’, the left, laid gently against the loudspeaker of the big old-fashioned wireless set, in which position, it seemed, Rosie could pick up not just music but voices. She wasn’t unduly concerned about her daughter’s need for solitude. She would keep an eye on the girl, though, for she was plagued by a fear that the germs that had almost cost Rosie her life twenty-one years ago might still be lurking in her bloodstream just waiting to strike again.