Cold Intent

by Tony Salter

  I could see what my father had meant about Granny. She was a different person from the one I’d seen just a few weeks earlier.

  Even in her own kitchen and wearing normal clothes, she looked frail – less substantial and much older. Exactly as Dad had told me, she’d withered into herself like a plant in need of watering. It was as though she’d already decided the tests would come back negative and mortality had suddenly caught up with her.

  Granny had always played the dominant role in our family, the ultimate arbiter of all things and especially what was socially acceptable and what wasn’t. There had never been room for the concepts of weakness or frailty in her world.

  She looked up and smiled as she saw me walk in. ‘Pour yourself a cup of tea and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  I poured the tea and sat down next to her. ‘Sorry to hear you’re under the weather,’ I said. ‘Hopefully, they’ll get everything sorted soon enough.’

  ‘Sorted out,’ she said. ‘Not “sorted”. If you’re going to be a writer, there’s no room for sloppiness in your language. In any case, I’m not convinced that they’ll be able to sort anything out, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t be so negative, Granny,’ I said. ‘I’m sure …’

  ‘… Oh, I’m not negative,’ she said. ‘Quite the opposite.’ She took a bird-like sip of her tea. ‘Do you remember the conversation we had a couple of years ago? Sitting right here? It was right after that terrible time when that witch Julie Martin locked you up and left you to die.’

  ‘Of course I remember,’ I said. ‘I try to forget about those days, but without much success. You were trying to take all the blame for what happened to Mum.’

  Although she was frail and her voice was weak, there was nothing wrong with her mind and her personality hadn’t changed.

  ‘You know that’s not quite accurate,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t taking all the blame. I was just acknowledging the fact that I wasn’t as kind to Fabiola as I might have been and that I believe my behaviour may have contributed to what happened.’

  ‘OK, Granny,’ I said. ‘I was only teasing. I remember what you said.’

  She looked at me with eyebrows arched. ‘Do you think there might be better times and better subjects for your humour?’ She didn’t look angry, but I wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Anyway, why were you thinking about that conversation?’

  ‘A scare like I’ve just had makes its mark. Maybe this one will turn out to be a false alarm, but if it’s not this one, something else will be along soon. I’m eighty-four and I’m not sad that I’ll be seeing your grandfather sooner rather than later. I would have liked to meet your children, but we can’t have everything, can we?’

  All I wanted to do was to tell her that she was wrong and that she was going to be fine. In a rare flash of mature insight, however, I understood that she didn’t want to hear those platitudes and my straw-clutching optimism wasn’t going to change a thing.

  ‘… And Mum? How does she figure in your thinking?’

  Although her brain was still working, she was obviously exhausted, and it took her a few moments to gather her thoughts.

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember,’ she said, as the pennies dropped into place. ‘D’you know what? I’m excited to see Fabiola again. I’ll be able to apologise at last, to tell her what a wonderful man her Sam has turned out to be, and I’m actually looking forward to finding out if she’s ever forgiven me.’

  Luckily my dad chose that moment to come back into the kitchen, noisily banging the kettle onto the Aga and offering more tea. I took the opportunity to slip out into the garden for five minutes and gather myself.

  How strange it must be to have such a simple, almost childlike faith? I found it impossible to believe in an afterlife where everyone you had ever known would be waiting for you, unchanged? How did it work, this faith which could override all logic?

  Plan B

  Nicki was looking a lot better than a few weeks earlier. Joe’s funeral would have helped her to draw a line, and she was made of strong stuff.

  ‘I had a letter from Sam Blackwell’s dad yesterday,’ she said, as she sat down. ‘Just like you said I would. It was an old-fashioned handwritten one and he told me that my father had emailed him and that Fabiola was my mother. He wants me and Sam to meet.’

  She shrugged her shoulders and leant back in her chair. ‘I promised to come and see you first … and here I am.’

  Our previous meeting had ended abruptly with Nicki apparently broken and overwhelmed by the onslaught of conflicting information piling on top of her. She must have felt as though she was standing in the middle of an earthquake watching the buildings collapsing around her.

  Although true empathy may not have been my strongest talent, I still had a sense for how people would respond to external factors – when it was right to push forward, and when it was better to stand back and wait. I’d known that Nicki would benefit from some time to process everything she’d heard about me, to look into the available facts and to draw her own conclusions. She’d also appeared to be genuinely grieving for Joe. He’d been a waste of space, but he’d been her waste of space.

  I couldn’t have planted my seeds better, they’d been well fed and watered, but Nicki was backed into a corner and would soon be coming under pressure to take sides, to choose who and what to believe. I was confident that I’d done enough to stay in control, but nothing was certain.

  ‘When are you meeting them?’

  ‘Friday morning,’ she said. ‘But I’m worried about Damocles. It’s been out there for a week now, and things will start to happen soon. What if I end up liking Sam? Should I warn him?’

  ‘You will like him. He’s charming and funny. That doesn’t change anything.’

  ‘But now I know he’s my half-brother …’

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘You understood the situation well enough before you found that out. Has anything really changed? Sam still helped to destroy Pulsar and put me here. Are you going soft on me?’

  ‘No. Of course not. It’s just …’

  ‘Listen to me. When you meet him, you need to play dumb – act totally surprised and embrace your long-lost family. You don’t know me. You worked for Pulsar for a few years, but only in a junior role. Give them the usual public-facing vanilla bullshit about Odell. Meanwhile our private project is moving forward one way or another. Falling on your sword won’t help anyone.’ I rested my fingertips on the glass between us and looked into her eyes. ‘Just remember what he took away from us.’

  ‘I know. I know you’re right,’ she said, her hand reaching out towards mine. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about what you did for me as a child. How you helped me to get out of that home and have a good life with my dad. It means a lot …’

  Our fingertips met on either side of the glass.

  ‘And just because he and I have the same mother,’ she continued. ‘That doesn’t change anything. I’ve never even met the guy.’ Her mouth hardened and I saw determined resolution in those familiar dark eyes. ‘As you say, he’s only getting what’s coming to him.’

  I watched her leave with a sinking feeling. She was still loyal to me, and the fact that she was the one who had created and launched Damocles would be difficult for her to explain away. But the prison wouldn’t allow me another social visit for weeks and meanwhile Sam would be turning on that boyish charm. Nicki had no other family and she would be tempted to embrace her new one.

  If I left the two of them to their own devices, it was only a matter of time before my plans crumbled into dust. I needed to take back control and I couldn’t do that from behind bars.

  Simon glared at the guard until she took a couple of steps back closer to the metal door. Josie was a walking sackful of bitterness and resentment. I’d been in Downview for two weeks and every time I saw her, she had the same scowl plastered over her fat face. She looked dangerous and the word was that she’d half killed a young girl w
ho’d upset her in some way. Nothing had come of it, of course. The wardens protected each other, whatever happened.

  As Simon leant forward towards me, I could see that the red blotches on his cheeks were gone and the purple veins on his nose were fading. He’d apparently taken my “suggestion” on board. Paying him too much had its advantages after all.

  ‘She’s meeting him on Friday,’ I said.

  ‘You knew it would happen.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘And you’ve spoken to her?’

  ‘Yes. Two weeks ago and again yesterday. I’ve done what I can for now.’

  ‘You’ll have heard that the other business went off as planned?’ His voice had dropped to a bass murmur.

  ‘Of course I heard.’

  ‘Well, you should be aware that it was tight. Only ten minutes to spare. No reason why that should cause complications, but it’s best that you know.’

  ‘Bloody right,’ I said. ‘That’s sloppy. What happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t reach David for twenty-four hours. Apparently he was heli-skiing in the Caucasus.’

  I’d learned from years of experience that money could buy almost anything. There was a slight caveat to that. If people were given too much money, they tended to enjoy spending it, which made them less available when I needed them. That was why, as a general rule, I always replaced my key operations people on a regular basis. There were some downsides, but it kept them hungry.

  Simon was an exception; he’d been my lawyer for over ten years. Although I’d often wondered if I could have done better, motivation was often as much about sticks as it was about carrots. Simon wouldn’t have wanted anyone to find out about the jobs he’d commissioned on my behalf.

  ‘Next time – if there is a next time – take a bit of initiative, Simon. When I say something is urgent, I’m not blowing hot air for the sake of it.’

  ‘Yes. I will,’ he said, beads of sweat glistening like tiny pearls on his forehead. ‘Now, about the appeal hearing …’

  ‘… Will we have a date in the next four weeks?’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Then it’s not important. We need to move to Plan B.’

  I hadn’t allowed for Joe’s cancer. Without the knowledge of his imminent death, I doubted he’d have had the courage to defy me, whether or not I was in prison. We would have had time for the appeal and the odds of overturning the conviction were more than evens. Unfortunately all plans were subject to unknown rogue factors – it was foolish to believe otherwise. The trick was to have contingency plans and I always made a point of having plenty of those.

  ‘Plan B?’ Simon said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I see.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No … well …no … there’s not a problem.’

  ‘Good. I’m thinking two weeks at the outside.’

  ‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘That’s not very long.’ His voice was shaky and I watched the dark patches of sweat spread inexorably across his pink shirt. White would have been a more sensible choice.

  ‘You’re not filling me with confidence, Simon,’ I said. ‘Is everything ready?’

  ‘Sorry, Julie. You just threw me for a minute.’ He pulled out a linen handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘Don’t worry. Two weeks is fine. The plan is in place. I just need to finalise a couple of details.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you won’t let me down. Now, there’s one other thing …’

  Siblings

  ‘You sure you’re up for this, Dad?’

  ‘Of course I am. This is a massive day for you. I couldn’t let you down.’ He turned to look at me, red-rimmed eyes blinking furiously. ‘Besides, what else am I going do?’

  Dad had spent most of the night at the John Radcliffe hospital holding Granny’s hand; I doubted he’d slept at all.

  We sat in silent solidarity as the train trundled painfully slowly through the sprawl of West London. I stared out of the window, the thick glass cool against my forehead. There was one graffiti tag which appeared again and again at the side of the tracks, usually in seemingly unreachable locations. It appeared that Ajax – whoever he or she might be – was equally happy hanging upside down from a bridge or balanced precariously on tiny ledges no wider than my thumb.

  Why? So random people going by on a train would know that Ajax existed? Once again. Why?

  Dad had arranged for us to meet Nicki in the lobby of the Park Lane Hilton. She’d wanted somewhere public, and the hotel was what they’d come up with. When he’d told me about the meeting a couple of days earlier, I wouldn’t have minded if the rendezvous had been set in the middle of Oxford Circus.

  I’d been so excited to have a firm date. My thoughts whirled like a cloud of helicopter seeds falling from a sycamore tree, each spinning in one direction for a few seconds before jolting randomly onto a completely different trajectory. Before I’d heard about Nicki, I’d begun to see a stable, predictable path stretching out in front of me. Not any longer. My future had been thrown up in the air again and the wait to see how the seeds would fall was both thrilling and agonising.

  I’d been reading about families who reunited with long-lost relations; a lot of them talked about the sense of a physical bond which was pulling them back together despite having been stretched almost to breaking point. I understood the feeling. Although I’d never really known my mother, discovering a living connection to her was a wonderful and unexpected gift.

  For all I knew, we might end up hating each other, but my gut feelings told me that being in the same room as my sister would be enough. Enough to satisfy that ache which, only a few weeks earlier, I hadn’t even known I had.

  The euphoria had lasted until a few hours earlier when life threw me another curve ball and the thrill melted away leaving nothing but a bad taste on the roof of my mouth. My Granny had died at three o’clock in the morning and all of my fears about “one in, another out” had come true in a moment of dark inevitability.

  Both Dad and I had been there at the end, along with Uncle Daz and, as far as I could tell, she didn’t suffer. She wasn’t really conscious – there were no final words – she just stopped being from one moment to the next.

  The doctor said that it looked as though she’d decided it was her time. He tried to explain how the power of a patient’s desire to live could keep them going and how, when that desire fades, the patient so often fades away as well. I wasn’t really listening, but the snippets which had slipped through reminded me of my final conversation with Granny.

  She’d known.

  Dad was holding up surprisingly well. In a place deep inside, I suspected he’d also known. He’d told me he didn’t feel anything was left unsaid or unresolved between them. He would miss her, but there was no itch which couldn’t be scratched, no sense of “if only …” or “I should have …”.

  ‘Granny was ready, wasn’t she,’ I said, as the train started to slow. ‘She was tired and bored of being old.’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I think she was also impatient to see your Gramps again.’

  ‘Yeah. She talked a bit about that with me last week … Strange to have such certainty.’

  ‘It’s what kept her strong,’ said Dad. ‘She believed things with such conviction. Not only religious faith, everything. She was infuriatingly dogmatic and intransigent, but she believed in family, loyalty and honour as much as anything else. That can’t be so bad.’ He stood up and pulled his coat from the rack above us. ‘I only remember her doubting herself once – when your mother died. It was the one time I can remember when she questioned her beliefs about anything.’

  I looked up at him and smiled. ‘We talked about that last week as well,’ I said. ‘She told me that she was looking forward to seeing Mum as well. To find out if she’d forgiven her.’

  Dad’s eyes lost focus for a moment. ‘I can believe that,’ he said. ‘She was never afraid of anything.’

  As we stepped off the train into the flow of people, he
took hold of my shoulder, leant towards me and whispered hoarsely in my ear. ‘I’d put money that your Granny knew the truth when she spoke with you. She knew how unlikely it was that Fabiola was going to forgive her – or any of us for that matter. Your mother was from the South of Italy. Gorgeous, passionate, kind, but not really the forgiving type.’

  We took a taxi from Paddington. Despite decades of doom-and-gloom merchants forecasting its demise, the traditional London Black Cab was alive and well, as much a part of the city’s soul as the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace.

  Luckily, we didn’t have a chatty driver and slipped back into silence as we drove along Bayswater and down Park Lane, sandwiched between massive buildings and the green lung of Hyde Park. I wanted to rekindle my former excitement, but the combination of losing my grandmother and being reminded of my mother had settled over my thoughts like a damp, grey fog. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

  The taxi pulled up outside the Hilton, I paid the driver and we stepped out into the bright sunshine. My dad wrapped his arm around me and steered me towards the hotel entrance.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ he said. ‘Enough of this sadness. I’m excited. You must be boiling over. Let’s go and meet your sister.’

  The next ten minutes passed in a blur. Most people will only ever know a handful of truly life-changing moments; the birth of a child; an unexpected diagnosis or maybe the loss of a loved one. It’s fortunate that there are usually only a few, as our bodies and minds inevitably struggle to cope with the emotional overload.

  I could remember how close I was to being sick as we walked through the lobby, our footsteps echoing plaintively on the marble floor. I could remember the uncertainty of a handshake which transmogrified into an awkward hug, I could remember trying to take in everything all at once – her eyes, mouth, body, hair, clothes, everything – and I could remember trying and failing to control the tears which threatened to overwhelm me.