IN THE SHADOW OF STRANGERS: A wealthy man is about to change her destiny …but it’s a secret.

by Wendy Reakes

  They walked through the door to the rear, into a storage area with two further doors marked Ladies and Gents and another entrance leading to the kitchen. Surprisingly, the kitchen was in good shape. It had been recently decorated and re-tiled and the equipment looked new. It wasn’t what she’d expected after seeing the shop out front. It seemed odd actually. “I wasn’t expecting a brand new kitchen,” she said. She was testing him. The whole episode had made her suspicious of every little thing.

  “Ah! Yes. It was completed recently just before the previous tenants moved out,” David Partridge answered. “It will give you a good start, but you may want to bring in some specialist equipment of your own. You’ll know better than us what you want.”

  “Better than whom?” She watched him wander around the kitchen opening fridge doors.

  “What? Oh, us, the estate agents. We’re assuming you’re going to put an upmarket restaurant in here.”

  “Why would you assume that?”

  “Well, you know it makes sense, a girl with your background in catering.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve mentioned my background.” And then it hit her. “So all of this is a setup is it? He’s behind all of this isn’t he?”

  “What?” David Partridge reddened. He looked guilty as hell. “Oh look it’s not so bad. If someone wants to give you a helping hand, take it as it’s intended, make a new start. You’re very lucky to have a mentor you know.”

  “Why is he doing this?” She ran her hand over the surface of the aluminium prep table. Her thoughts were all over the place. “I don’t like being controlled. He knows that.”

  “Gordon Ben…”

  “DON’T you Gordon Bennet me.” She poked him on the lapel. “Ben Corner has got a bloody nerve and you can guarantee I’ll be taking this up with him when I get back.”

  Chapter 28

  Gordon Bentley saw David Partridge arrive at the bar. He and Jack were just about to tuck into a hearty beef and ale pie with a generous portion of chips. David joined them after securing himself a pint of their best bitter. “How did it go?” Gordon asked.

  He took a long sip of his drink. “It went well, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “The kitchen nearly gave the game away.”

  “Tut!” Jack interrupted. “Those kitchens never know when to keep their mouths shut.”

  “Very funny!” David Partridge sniped. He seemed nervous and now Gordon was wondering whether or not he’d put his size elevens right in it. “I mean, the new kitchen you told us to put in for her, she caught wind of something when she saw that.”

  “What did you tell her? Please tell me you were discreet.” Gordon picked up a chip with his fingers.

  “What you told me to tell her. But she kind of assumed it was her boyfriend who put me up to it. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first. I thought she knew about you.”

  Gordon stared at him, with his chip suspended in mid-air as he waited for the rest of the story. “You didn’t tell her about me!”

  David downed his pint. He looked ready for another. “No, of course not! What do you take me for? But…”

  “But what?” Gordon’s blood pressure was rising.

  “Well, I might have said she was lucky to have a mentor.”

  “Oh, that’s just bloody great!” Gordon threw his chip back onto his plate. He turned to look at Jack’s shoulders shaking as he laughed. “What’s so funny?”

  Jack held up his hands. “Leave me out of this. I’m not saying a word,” Then he tucked into his pie.

  Chapter 29

  The day after she met David Partridge, she confronted Ben about the whole thing; the French woman in the café, the chauffeur driven limo, Benny’s Bites…He denied everything, of course, and she almost believed him until she went over it, again and again. It had to be him. There was no other explanation…But, what if it was all legitimate? What was that saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth? No, it had to be Ben Corner.

  Finally, she told Ben she was taking the restaurant, despite him and his controlling ways. “And you can shove this lot.” She took the cards David Partridge had given her and threw them at him. “I’ll get my own finance and my own solicitor.”

  He still denied his involvement and the part that confused her the most, was when he told her he didn’t want her to take the restaurant. He said that Ealing was so far away he wouldn’t see her very often. None of it made sense.

  Regardless of Ben’s involvement, and suddenly enthused by the whole venture, she put together a business plan, half expecting her loan application to be turned down. When she presented it to the bank they approved the funds wholeheartedly. In fact, they said she’d be crazy not to take the restaurant. They said she’d also benefit from not having to pay rent on her flat South of the river, and that in its entirety, it appeared to be a very lucrative proposition indeed.

  The lawyer who handled the transfer said the same. He said the rent for that amount of square footage was considerably low and that the inventory, consisting mainly of the brand new kitchen equipment, was a huge bonus. Considering it was a ten-year lease, she should consider herself very lucky. She recalled hearing that before. A lucky girl. The estate agent, David Partridge had said it. A lucky girl!

  Despite her initial fears, her suspicions and her complete lack of faith in her ability, she withdrew five-thousand-pounds from the account Annie had opened for her, and used it as a deposit. That was the one thing she was completely sure about. If she was going to spend the money on anything, a new business was something her mother would have wholeheartedly approved of.

  “A restaurant! What could be more fitting than that?” she’d said to her grandmother on the phone.

  The day Katherine quit the Savoy and moved into the flat above the café, was the day everything changed. No longer a struggling chef, she was now a businesswoman in her own right. Apart from not having a clue how she was going to turn a dilapidated old café into a ‘place to go’ restaurant, she was now independent and solely reliant on her own ability. She doubted she knew enough to do it, and if she did somehow manage to get the place open, what would she do if the venture failed? She wasn’t just a little dubious about the whole thing; Katherine Killa was absolutely scared to death.

  Chapter 30

  Two weeks after the refurbishments began, she took a call from her grandmother, Rose. “I’ve gone and broken my old leg,” she said. “But, you mustn’t worry, I’ll manage.”

  Katherine rang Ben straight away. They had remained friends, despite their history. “I need you to watch the shop, just for a week or so. Can you do that for me, Ben? Please!” She hadn’t wanted to ask him, but she couldn’t think of anyone else who could do it. Ben was the only one she knew who could take charge of things while she was gone, to oversee the refurbishments and to ensure they stayed on track with the deadline.

  She handed him the keys the morning before she left. He took instruction from her for the electrician, the tiler and the decorators without question and somehow it worried her. The shop, as she called it, was her baby now and if she had to have a babysitter, she wanted him to feel as passionate about it as she.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said before she left. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  When she arrived at the cottage in Wales, Rose was laid up with a cast on her leg. They both cried when they saw each other, and held onto one another for several minutes before they eventually let go. “It was those stairs,” Rose said, glancing towards the door across the room.

  The door was open and she could see the old, rickety, wooden staircase beyond it. “We should have had them seen to a long time ago. Nobody has doors at the bottom of their stairs any more.

  “The light bulb went, so I couldn’t see a thing when I came down that morning,” Rose said.

  “Well, you won’t have to worry anymore, because I’m here to look after you. I’ll stay as long as it takes.” She ran her hand over the cast on her gran
dmother’s leg.

  “You’ll do no such thing. I just need you to help me get your mam’s room out the back, sorted for me. You can bring all my things down from my room and I’ll be right as rain down here.”

  “No, I can’t leave you like this.”

  “Kathy, my lovely!” She pushed her hair back from her shoulders, just like her mother used to do. “The Bentley’s next door offered me their house in the grounds, but I turned it down. I don’t want charity and you know that I could never leave here. Not with all the memories.” Rose glanced around the room, remembering Annie and the times they’d all shared together. “What I’m saying is, if I thought I couldn’t manage, I would have taken them up on it, wouldn’t I? Your mam managed all right in this house in a wheelchair, so I’m sure I can cope with this stupid cast.”

  “What about your cleaning jobs, Nana?”

  “I’ve given most of them up, anyhow. The money you send me more than makes up for them and the others will still be there when I get back on my feet. You just help get me sorted, and get yourself back to London, like a good girl. You’ve got your restaurant to worry about now, Kathy. I won’t feel happy about you giving that up.”

  “Okay, but I’m staying for a week. I’ll do plenty of baking and put some meals in the freezer for you.”

  “Frozen food, Kathy? Oh, I’m not sure about that, my lovely.”

  A week later, in the taxi going back towards the train station, she had hesitated about leaving her grandmother alone. She’d stayed eight days before Rose had insisted she should leave. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay forever, to be with her, but she knew in her heart it wasn’t practical. Especially since she now needed to make some more money to send home to Rose each week.

  Rose objected to taking more money from her but she was adamant. “It will help out. Just take it will you! Use it to get someone in to help you with the chores.”

  She telephoned Ben every day and he provided her with a progress report on the restaurant. Apart from a few minor problems, everything seemed to be ticking over smoothly except for one thing. The quote had arrived for all the furniture and it was more expensive than she’d budgeted for. “It’s the holding area that’s bumping up the cost,” Ben said over the phone. “You’re having it all made to order, and its expensive.”

  “I know, but I’ve got to have a focal point in there, otherwise it going to be just four walls with tables and chairs. It will look boring. Beside I want to put all my wines on display, I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing; a wine list in a red plastic folder.”

  “Oy, watch it,” he said. “I’ve got those.”

  Now, looking out of the taxi window going towards the train station, Katherine saw something familiar and suddenly shouted for the driver to stop the car. “Pull over! I need to get out.” They were on an old road just outside the city centre. She remembered it from when she was a little girl, when she went there a few times with her father.

  She stared at the massive block of dilapidated buildings on the other side of the road, filthy black after years of being pasted with fumes from the busy traffic running alongside it. At the bottom of the building were rows of old shop fronts, some with windows boarded up and some with their panes intact, covered with black soot and grime. Above, over four floors, the black bricks crumbled around windows looking out over the road, some boarded, some not.

  She stepped out of the car. She was mesmerized, as if her one mission was to cross the road to the other side. “Oy miss, where’re you going?” the taxi driver called.

  She ignored him in her quest to get to the other side of the road. She ran and dodged the oncoming traffic, then, making it to the other side, she stopped at one of the disused shops. Her memory of the time she visited it with her father was explicit, as if it happened yesterday. The picture she had of him holding her hand as they went inside was a wonderfully liberating experience, freeing her from a memory of nothing. Her lack of recollection of that part of her childhood had always been a heavy load to bear. She remembered she loved him more than anything, but up until her eighth birthday, she couldn’t recall a thing.

  Looking up at the store front, she now remembered how, when she was just seven-years-old, her father had brought her there for the first time. Annie had waited in the car, parked where the taxi was parked now. She recalled how her father had run with her to cross the busy main road, and still with his hand clutching hers, he’d pushed open the inner door to the tinkling sound of silver bells above their heads.

  The tiny shop was dark and dingy, devoid of any stock or apparatus; only an ornately carved solid-oak counter dominating the middle of the floor. Holding onto her father’s hand, perching on tip-toes, she’d gazed over the counter to an old lever button till. It was dirty after years of use with only the levers well-oiled and silvery. Behind it, as a counterpart, stood row upon row of narrow slanted wooden shelves holding little round parcels of white shirt collars, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She remembered spotting her father’s parcel immediately, just being able to make out the name Killa scrawled on a brown paper label attached to it.

  A small, tired looking Chinese man stepped out of a door to the side and her father had handed him a green raffle ticket with the number 33 stamped in black faded ink. “Killa!” he’d said. And as the man took the ticket, he’d acknowledged her father with a curt nod of the head, in a curious subservient way. As the transaction was completing, she had run her hands over the counter front, working the tip of her finger into the carved swirling grooves of the wood, wiping away the dust as she went.

  Now, there she was, nearly twenty-years later. She smiled to herself as she went into the alcove at the side of the large blackened window. The glass door, ‘sounding silver bells’ was locked, but the side window wasn’t quite as black as the main one facing the road. She rubbed her fingers against the pane, rubbing away the layers of dirt and making a peephole so that she could look inside. She gasped when she saw it. It was dark and dusty inside with some broken chairs stacked on top of each other, but beyond them, sitting proud, covered in paint pots and old rags, she could see the elaborately carved counter, undisturbed by time.

  She traced the owners of the building via the town hall. They told her it was owned by a property development company whose plans were to tear it down. She’d was informed that the Swansea Heritage people had objected, claiming it was a building of historical importance, so permission for demolition had been refused. Instead, they’d sold the building to a subsidiary property development company who were currently seeking permission to renovate it and turn it into apartments and rented office space. She’d spoken to the director of the firm and within the hour she’d secured ownership of the counter and its back drop for the price of a meal when he was next in London. She couldn’t believe her luck. “Well, it would probably just end up on a skip, so you may as well have it,” he’d said.

  That just left her with the cost of shipping. But with tremendous luck, she’d found a transport company in Swansea who did regular shipments to London, and after she’d told them what she wanted, they’d agreed to take it on one of their loads the following week at a minimal charge.

  Her day couldn’t have been any better.

  Chapter 31

  Jack Taylor saw the Killa girl walk in and his heart missed a beat. He was sitting in Keith’s office at their depot in Swansea when he saw her through the glass panel in the door. He couldn’t believe it was her. There, at the depot! A thought had crossed his mind that she had somehow found out about Gordon’s ‘little protection racket’ as he called it, and that she was there to take him down a peg or two as Gordon’s partner in crime.

  He sometimes rued the day he ever met Gordon Bentley, although it had to be said, he had always had a tremendous regard for the man. After all, if it hadn’t been for Gordon, Jack wouldn’t have met his partner and there they were now, about to take a second depot in Gloucestershire with six new lorries and twelve contain
ers. Purchasing it was enough to secure Jack a further fifteen percent share of their business and security for life.

  Now, there she was, Katherine, talking to Keith’s secretary in the reception area. He sat at the desk and pressed the buzzer. Paula picked up the phone. “Yes, Jack?”

  “Paula, can you come into the office please.” His voice was almost a whisper.

  “I’m with a customer at the moment, Jack.”

  “Yes, I know. Make your excuses and come through.”

  Paula came into the office, closing the door behind her. “Is there something wrong?” she asked quietly. Jack’s low whispering tone was becoming infectious.

  “That woman,” he nodded towards the reception area through the glass panel. “What does she want?”

  “Jack!” Paula said. “Why are we whispering?” She rolled her eyes. “She was going past the front gates on her way to the station, and she thought she’d pop in and ask if we could do a job for her.”

  “Just like that?”

  Paula nodded. “And she’s going to miss her train if we don’t hurry up, Jack.”

  “What sort of job?”

  “She’s bought a piece of furniture, a bar or something she said, and she wants it taken to London.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her no, of course.”

  “Why did you do that?” Jack was still talking in monotones.

  “Because we don’t do domestic stuff! You know that better than me, Jack.”

  “Tell her we’ll do it,” he said.