Loose Ends

by Susan Moody

  ‘Or a nursery.’ A rocking horse, Magnus thought, a little boy in a sailor suit, riding back and forth, a smiling young wife, nothing like Edwina Mountbatten, someone not dissimilar to the agent herself, with a baby girl on her hip. (‘Darling, I think Isabella is teething . . .’)

  ‘You’d never regret buying this, Mr Lennox.’

  She was a chirpy little thing, not exactly pretty, but nicely turned out. He particularly admired the way her dark hair had been twisted up at the back of her head, with a fountain spray of hair springing from the bejewelled comb thing which secured it. ‘It’s in a truly appalling condition,’ he said.

  ‘Admittedly it’ll need a little work to fix it up but—’

  ‘A little? It’ll cost thousands, not to mention the upheaval involved.’

  Imagination saw him five years later, a lot of hard work and money down the line. It could be really something . . .

  ‘The price is ridiculous,’ he said boldly, startling himself. It was the sort of thing his father might have said. He started back down the rickety staircase.

  ‘Property is my business, Mr Lennox, and I can promise you that whatever it costs you to do up will be money well spent. Five years from now, the houses in this area will have trebled in value. Trust me.’

  Magnus didn’t. There were a great many people he didn’t trust, among them politicians, journalists, solicitors, conspiracy theorists, wild-eyed enthusiasts who held convincing proof that Anna Anderson was the real Anastasia Romanov. But especially not estate agents.

  ‘I don’t think it’s for me,’ he said. ‘Nor for anyone else, for that matter.’

  She looked astonished that he could be on the verge of abandoning this amazing one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. ‘But think of the investment potential.’

  ‘I can see a lot of investment, and very little potential,’ he said. ‘Sorry, it’s practically derelict. It’ll cost a fortune to bring round, a fact which doesn’t seem in any way to be reflected in the price.’

  ‘I suppose you could always put in an offer.’ She sounded dubious, as though putting in an offer was a laughably daring notion, unlikely to be taken seriously.

  Which Magnus had done, a ridiculously low one, and was barely surprised when it was accepted. He imagined the vendor laughing all the way to the bank at the fool who had been parted so soon from his money. Ten years later, the area hadn’t yet upped though, like a hesitant groom on his wedding night, it could be said to be constantly on the verge of coming, vide the yuppies and their bay trees necessarily chained to the walls of their houses to thwart vandals and thieves, but by now Magnus was used to the traffic, the wheelie-bins which seemed to still be overflowing even when the garbage truck had just passed, the empty beer cans thrown into his bedraggled little front garden, the used condoms which decorated the holly tree. Outside, the house still looked neglected but inside, over time, he had turned it into a highly desirable gentleman’s residence.

  During the necessary renovations, he had taken the advice of his builder and turned the attic rooms into a self-contained flat, a small kitchen, a bedroom with an en-suite shower-room, a reasonable sitting room. The idea was to have let the flat to someone appropriate (‘suit professional couple’) but somehow he had never got round to finding anyone appropriate, shades of his Cambridge digs haunting him, smells of curry, overflowing baths, rubbish bags on the stairs, thumping music of the kind which gave him a migraine. Arctic Monkeys, he thought (fogeyishly) or Babyshambles (where did they find these names?), the sort of thing he didn’t wish to have to contend with, the role of landlord definitely not one he was suited for. (‘There seems to be some mix-up about the rent this month, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave at the end of week.’) And suppose the tenants turned violent, started threatening him, the woman fish-wifeing in the background while her husband bunched his fists and swung them at Magnus, or worse still, picked up a poker or something (not that there would have been one handy since the heating was electric), Magnus’s ideas of ‘professional’ couples being hazy at best.

  He thought sadly of Anabel, the cousin of a lecturer in economics at the university, introduced at a faculty party because, so everyone said, especially Anabel, she would suit Magnus down to the ground. While bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Edwina Mountbatten, he was aware that Anabel (slim, tailored, lots of red lipstick) would nonetheless have thrown many a stylish dinner party, had he been able to bring himself to propose to her. But in his heart, he knew she was too brisk for him, too organized, unlikely to allow him the hours of dreaming he needed to write his history texts, even though they would be bringing money into their joint household. The mere prospect of Anabel moving in with him, changing the paint colours (magnolia), stripping off his chosen wallpapers (Sanderson’s William Morris Pimpernel in his bedroom, Willow on the top landing, Golden Lily in the attic bedroom, a bit eighties, but they suited the period of the house), modernizing the kitchen, buying new furniture, chivvying, had been too much for him. For the most part, he liked his house the way it was, and so he had kept silent, though he knew she had expected him to suggest that they get married.

  He would have loved to show the estate agent around it, but when he dropped into the agency’s High Street premises on some pretext or other, he was informed that she was now working elsewhere and it was obvious that no way were they going to tell him where that might be. A pity. He’d envisaged a light-hearted drink somewhere, while they laughed over the ludicrous price the owner had originally asked, and he’d conceded that to a certain extent she had been right about the potential of his property. And then he might have suggested supper somewhere, or arranged a second meeting on another evening – dinner, a film, a concert at the Arts Centre – and who knew where that might have led to? In his secret heart, he’d hoped it might have led, however circuitously, to bed, and now she had turned up again, sharing with his sister, caring for her because for all Kate’s talk of independence, she needed to be taken care of.

  What would he give Janine (and Kate too, of course) when she came at the weekend? Something simple – soup, maybe, he could make that butternut squash soup, good on a cold night, or what about, since there were only three of them, a cheese soufflé? (He’d heard someone on Brain of Britain deriding soufflés – ‘so Eighties’ and couldn’t see why food should come in and out of fashion, a soufflé was a soufflé, after all, and very nice too). He could follow it with tiny lamb cutlets marinated in port and rosemary, with peas except you couldn’t get those at this time of year, unless he went for petit pois, have to be out of a jar, but that’s how the French eat them, or he might go for green beans, never mind that they came from Kenya and exploited the local farmers, new potatoes (ditto), home-made mint sauce, not that bilious green stuff you got from the supermarket, followed by some of the pastries from the pâtisserie around the corner, with proper coffee. Excellent. And he’d better check that everything was dusted and looked at its best before Janine saw it, get some flowers from Happy Days Florists (it seemed such a short time ago that he and Kate had discussed the possibility of her setting up as a florist, God knew why, she’d never had a clue about arranging flowers), put them here and there around the place, a vase in the hall, a couple in the drawing room, another on the bureau in his bedroom, another in the first-floor passage.

  Despite the ache he felt on behalf of his sister, he found himself excited at the prospect of Janine (nothing like Edwina, apart from being thin) viewing his home, making assumptions about the kind of man he was. Oh Lord, would it look too prissy to have flowers all over the show? He wouldn’t want her to think he was gay, not that there was the slightest thing wrong in being gay, he didn’t mean that, just that if she thought he was, she’d be less interested in him as a . . . as a friend, even supposing she was interested in the first place, which was of course, entirely unlikely, when he considered, and anyway, what about the Oklahoman woman, whose name he could scarcely remember now except that it ended in o – what should he do about her if
she should get in touch wanting to use the flat, an idea for which he now had no taste at all, though at the time of offering he had felt a considerable excitement, but given that . . .

  Trussed in a labyrinthine coil of subordinate clauses, Magnus finally fell asleep.

  Kate

  Eighteen

  She found the days relatively easy to get through. Settling back into the normality of her job at TaylorMade, the undemanding work involved in helping people to choose a holiday, the fact that it was her own courage and skill which had released her, was beneficial. The physical damage healed, and so did some of the psychological. She thought that perhaps her hatred of her abductors had helped her survive reasonably unimpaired.

  The nights were more difficult. It had been three weeks since she had broken out of her prison, but the drugs they’d given her, plus those at the hospital to help her sleep, were still raging round her body, playing havoc with her physical systems. Even without the nightmares, she couldn’t sleep, would wake convinced she’d slept for hours only to find that it had been for forty minutes. She would lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling stained apricot by the council lighting outside the curtains, her mind filled with a shifting kaleidoscope of vivid scenes from her past, Luisa’s dark hair, lava formations on the Galápagos, moonlight shining on the loch in front of the croft near Inverness, a beetle waving its antennae as it slowly walked up her arm, the wrinkled grey skin of Brixton’s cockatielian feet, Annie.

  Not every night, but on more than enough of them, even in a medically induced sleep, she found herself envisaging the scenario if she had not managed to escape. The images of her own death at the hands of Mick – it would have been him who carried out her execution, assassination, murder, not Stefan – flashed in front of her, time after time. However hard she tried, she could not escape the vile pictures in her own head: Mick with a knife, slicing her flesh; Mick with an axe, cutting off her hands, her feet, her breasts; Mick forcing her to drink acid, enjoying the sight of her agony as the corrosive liquid slowly dissolved her interior organs; or thrusting her head into a bucket of water, over and over again; or poisoning her with radiation like that poor Russian guy – Litvinenko, was it? – who took days to die, all the time knowing there was no cure, no hope, or Mick imprisoning her in a deep freeze cabinet with a glass door – she’d seen it in a film once – watching the icicles form while the blood froze slowly in her veins, and him laughing, raising a glass of whisky at her as her gradually congealing eyes stared helplessly out at him.

  She spent hours in the bath, scented candles everywhere, expensive bath gels poured in by the gallon, soothing music playing softly (Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, nothing too demanding), washing away, over and over again, all that had happened, trying not to think about Stefan who was safely locked away, on remand and awaiting trial, and Mick who had managed to disappear before the police were on to him. Stefan wasn’t talking (too afraid of retribution from Mick’s pals on the inside, according to the police) and so far, three weeks later, no-one had any idea where to look for him (‘but we’ll get him, never fear’). She lay awake at night wondering if he was lurking outside the flat, waiting to break in and kill her, so that she couldn’t talk, couldn’t condemn him to a prison sentence, just as Stefan would be condemned once his trial began. In the daylight hours, she knew this was irrational: the last place Mick would lurk would be somewhere the police might expect him to lurk, but at night, irrationality became entirely rational, almost expectable.

  ‘Go away,’ Janine told her. ‘Have a holiday – I’ll come with you, if you like, look out for you, you’d be safe, I swear it, we could go anywhere in the world.’ But Kate felt more secure in her own familiar environs than roaming the globe in an effort to escape her demons. Magnus urged her to go up to Uncle Blair’s in Edinburgh; they would so love to have her, he told her, they had come down at once when they heard what had happened, but she felt it unfair to saddle them with her griefs.

  At her urging, Jefferson Andrewes had gone on his holiday to the Galápagos. (Why did she have to urge him, when he was no more to her than a client, a business acquaintance?) She smiled slightly in the dangerously teeming darkness of her bedroom, remembering how he’d talked of running with the turtles. He had suggested several times that they have dinner together but she always declined, turning away her head, not wanting to look into his eyes and see pity there or, worse still, a prurient curiosity. Damaged goods . . . the phrase rang perpetually in her mind, damaged goods, like a London street crier – walk up, walk up, buy your damaged goods here – except of course no-one knowing her history would now want to buy her, even at a knock-down price. She tried to walk tall, pretend she was the same as she had always been, but she wasn’t. However, gradually, she began to put back together someone similar to but not exactly the person she had once been and from the fog of the past few years, determinations took hold. Magnus was right: she had to go back and complete her degree, she had to return to the Galápagos and face up to The Accident, she had to put Brad Fullerton the Third or Fourth behind her for good.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Janine. ‘If you want to find another flatmate, I’d quite understand.’

  ‘Don’t be silly . . .’

  ‘And if you’d rather I handed in my notice at TaylorMade, I’d understand that too.’

  ‘I want you to stay exactly as you are.’ They were drinking coffee after work. ‘In the end, you really only have two choices – you can either cave in, let it break you, or you can ignore it, as far as that’s possible, and go forward. I haven’t known you long, Kate, but I would guess that you’d opt for the second choice. And I can tell you that as far as I and TaylorMade Travel are concerned, we want you to stay on board.’

  ‘Thanks, Janine.’ Kate bit her lip, sensing the tears which came so much more easily these days (‘stiff upper lip, Kate’).

  One Sunday, she drove down to Besford, the village in Hampshire where Lindsay Bennett had died. She’d spent some time on the Internet, looking up the White Pages and reading newspaper reports from a couple of years back, had read the full story of Lindsay, winner of a Fulbright Scholarship, waiting to travel to the States to spend a year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, working at a London bar to earn some extra cash. Home for a few days with her family, she’d walked down to the pub, no more than five hundred yards from her home, to meet long-standing friends. On her way back, a car had hit her from behind, knocked her half into the ditch along the road, and left her to die. The person responsible had never been found.

  Kate parked along the grass verge in front of the house and walked through the five-barred white gate, from where the sound of a lawnmower chugging up and down at the back of the house was clearly audible. They probably wouldn’t hear her if she knocked so she went round the side of the house. In front of her was a large stretch of lawn, striped in darker and paler bands of green where a man steering a ride-on mower up and down had already passed. A woman in a straw hat was sitting in the shade of an enormous Cedar of Lebanon reading the Guardian. Another woman, younger, was strimming the edges of the herbaceous borders which lined both side of the brick-walled garden. The greatest of personal tragedies sweeps across your life, but you go on, thought Kate, strimming and trimming, just as you always have. At the straw-hatted woman’s side was a weathered teak garden table covered in an embroidered linen cloth and holding an assortment of tea-things, a plate of sandwiches, scones which appeared to be home-baked, and a cake on a glass stand.

  Kate advanced across the lawn, hoping someone would notice her before she could scare them, and would at the same time turn off all the noise. The woman eventually looked up and raised a hand to shade her eyes.

  ‘And you are?’ she said loudly, above the lawnmower and the strimmer. Then added, ‘Look, would you mind going and asking my husband to turn that darn thing off, my daughter too, and to be civilized enough to come for their tea.’

  ‘All right.’ Kate walked over to the girl and waited unt
il she was in her line of vision, then mimed switching off.

  ‘Oh,’ the girl said, doing so. ‘Have you come for tea?’

  ‘Not intentionally,’ Kate said. ‘My name’s Kate Fullerton.’

  ‘I’m Sarah Bennett. Are you a friend of my mother’s?’

  Kate looked over her shoulder at the man, still obliviously churning up and down the grass. ‘I’m a complete stranger, actually. Look, before your father – is it? – turns off the mower, could you . . . I don’t want to bring up matters which I know must be painful, but would any of you mind if I talked to you and your parents about – about your sister?’

  Sarah’s eyes narrowed. ‘Which one?’ she said. ‘There are three of us.’ And Kate wondered whether she meant that there had once been four girls, but were now only three, or that there had always been three, even though one was no longer around. ‘Lindsay,’ she said, awkward now, wishing she hadn’t come, but she had to know, had to do something, not sit there inactive, as though Mick and Stefan had the right to violate her and then get away with it, even though Stefan was now under police surveillance, awaiting trial.

  A subdued light showed in Sarah’s face, not exactly eager, no-one would be eager to hear further news about a murdered sister, but at least involved. ‘Are you from the police? Have you found out who killed her?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no. It’s just that I’ve been the vic . . . I’ve been attacked too, and for a number of reasons, I’m wondering if it could possibly have been by the same person – or people – who was responsible for your sister’s death.’

  ‘I see.’ Sarah waited until her father had reached the end of a long strip of grass and manoeuvred his machine round in a curve. ‘Dad!’ she screamed, waving her hand and when she’d caught his attention, made flicking motions, at the same time taking Kate’s arm in a tightish grip and moving her towards the woman in the straw hat who was now pouring tea into cups and rattling teaspoons around.