Lexie had called Ruby’s name, quietly so she wouldn’t be startled. She seemed not to hear. McCall began climbing towards her. Ruby stopped singing. The nearer he came, the more she made fearful whimpering noises like a cornered animal.
Lexie was scared she might fall and wanted to ring the fire brigade to bring a ladder. But McCall said a mob of men in uniform would frighten her even more. He had a better idea.
He ran to fetch Leila. She abandoned her customers without a thought. Immediately she saw Ruby, Leila dropped to her knees and made the sign of the cross for here was a miracle beyond understanding.
‘Little one, come. I beg you.’
Nobody dared move or speak.
‘Come, little one. Come to me, come down to Leila.’
Ruby began waving, as if saying farewell to someone or something in the castle-like pumping station on the far side of the black water. Then she swung a bare leg over the branch and let herself down the main trunk with the sureness of a cat – and with all its wariness, too.
‘You gave us fright,’ Leila said. ‘But all OK now, my darling.’
Ruby stood at the base of the tree, hair uncombed, hands clasped together over her torn polka dot dress and staring down at her dirty white trainers as if waiting for punishment. Lexie smiled and instinctively moved towards her but Ruby turned away and went instead to Leila’s open arms.
‘You safe, you home now, little one.’
Leila took charge. She gathered Ruby to herself and carried her from the reservoir like an infant, whispering that everything would be all right and nothing was wrong.
Ruby held tight to Leila so no one could see her face. Upstairs in Leila’s private quarters, Lexie couldn’t be sure if Ruby remembered who she was. They’d only ever met occasionally.
McCall stood apart, committing the drama of the moment to his reporter’s memory. Where had Ruby spent this past fortnight? How could so naïve a child survive alone on the unforgiving streets of London? He didn’t believe it possible. Someone had taken her and she must have escaped. Locked within this seemingly unreachable, dysfunctional girl was an extraordinary story, made all the more so by her precocious talent as an artist.
Leila brought in a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits then sat on the settee with a protective arm around Ruby’s bony shoulders.
‘You hungry, sweetheart? You want more food… proper food?’
She nodded and Leila went back into her kitchenette to make beans on toast. Ruby deliberately turned away from the room and hid her face in a cushion.
Lexie prayed no one could read her mind. There was sympathy in her heart but nothing truly maternal, nothing connected by blood. It had always been hard to like Ruby. She was a remote, rude and disobedient child with little understanding of how her behaviour affected anyone else.
Etta once said Ruby’s abnormal tempers could spark off for no real reason like her pencils being moved from how she’d left them. Lexie knew she now faced an impossible choice - give Ruby a home or put her in one. It felt like she’d woken up in a car crash and was trapped in the wreckage.
McCall’s mobile rang and disturbed her thoughts. The police were sending a female inspector and a doctor to carry out initial checks on Ruby. He and Lexie headed back to Etta’s flat, struggling to keep hold of Ruby, playing the banshee and rolling around on the pavement.
‘No! No! No! Won’t do! Won’t do!’
‘Sweetie, come on,’ Lexie said. ‘Please, we must get you home and cleaned up.’
‘No! Wrong way! Wrong way!’
McCall crouched down.
‘It’s OK, Ruby. It’s OK. You show us the right way…come on. You show us.’
Her eyes were the palest cornflower blue he’d ever seen with all but the faintest trace of colour rinsed out. Ruby immediately looked away from him, as if she wanted no one to see inside her mind. Then she ran back to the café, stood on one foot, turned round twice and started walking on her own towards Linden House.
She took care not to step on a crack or any litter. McCall and Lexie followed a few paces behind.
‘She’s an obsessive, compulsive,’ McCall said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Imposes rigid routines on herself. She can’t help it. It’s the way she is.’
‘And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.’
‘No, it’s manageable.’
‘Still going to be a nightmare though, isn’t it?’
‘Nothing like the nightmare Ruby might’ve just been through.’
‘Do you think she’ll tell us where she’s been, what’s happened to her?’
‘Maybe, but it won’t be easy to get it out of her. She could’ve buried it.’
‘And how am I going to tell her about her mother?’
‘Let’s get some advice from the police and the doctor on that.’
‘Doesn’t matter what they say, it’ll still be my responsibility. But I’ve never had to do anything this difficult in my life.’
Twenty-One
The faint scent of flowers puzzled Hoare on entering his bedsit. Even his fags and booze-impaired faculties picked up an alien waft of the countryside within the staleness of the room where he crashed most nights. It wasn’t important.
Of flowers, Hoare knew little - not those growing in gardens or arranged in bouquets to placate a wife. He could recognise the sickly reek of privet but what came through the dank of his flat was more like a fragrance remembered from a meadow - wild but subtle, hard to define.
Wherever it had originated - the other bedsit on his landing or those on the two floors below - he’d more tangible matters to attend to.
It’d been a more than satisfactory day. Teddy Lamb coughed up a few secrets to give him a line on the trade union eavesdropper at Rules. He’d also made up his mind to quit the police for Inglis’s much higher profile PR job in politics. With this new life in prospect, he’d seen a Greek tailor in Soho to be measured for a three-piece suit in charcoal grey. He would look the knees of a bee during TV appearances yet to come.
Despite his lunchtime jolly with Teddy, Hoare’s low alcohol warning light was flashing. He poured a Scotch, lit the last cigarette from his third pack of twenty that day and began drafting a letter of resignation in readiness for Inglis firming up his offer.
Next, he wrote a detailed note of all the compromising trade union naughtiness Teddy let slip in his cups. As insurance policies went, it was cheap at the price. Hoare then switched on his portable television and lay fully clothed on the unmade bed to watch the early evening news.
But he nodded off and woke an hour later, crumpled and hungry. It was time for another all-day breakfast at the greasy spoon round the corner where his face was becoming known.
Before he went, he needed to hide the gold dust he’d winkled out of Teddy. It could go with all the paperwork and photographs he’d already liberated from the Ruby Ross investigation. This was in a large folder slipped into the narrow space between his wardrobe drawer and the floor beneath.
As he took hold of the file, it felt different - thinner, lighter. Then he saw why. All the Ruby material was missing. But the bedsit door hadn’t been forced. His one window remained bolted from the inside. The intruder must have had a key. If this was Benwick’s idea of a funny, it wasn’t Hoare’s.
But the wider implications of this little robbery sank in. Someone, whoever it was, now knew he’d been stealing confidential police documents.
People were sacked or even jailed for that. Nick the Greek might yet be stitching hubristic arrows on Hoare’s new suit. He told himself not to panic.
Another Scotch would help but his mobile rang. A woman, well spoken and sure of herself, asked if he was Malky Hoare, the police press officer.
‘I might be. Who is this?’
‘No-one important.’
‘So why are you ringing me?’
‘Just checking you’re at home, that’s all.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
He knew then he’d been rumbled. The apartment took on a cell-like feel. He moved the shirts drying on hangers above the sink and stuck his head under the tap. The cold water ran over his face and onto the unwashed plates in the bowl below. It wasn’t flowers he’d smelt. It was perfume.
But the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the bare wooden stairs to his landing quickly drove this irrelevance from his mind.
*
However mildly she was coaxed by the police inspector, Ruby refused to answer any questions about who’d taken her or what’d happened afterwards. But she did allow herself to be examined by the doctor.
‘There’s no physical sign of sexual assault,’ she said. ‘We should hope she undergoes what’s called dissociative amnesia, in other words, she blanks out what happened.’
Ruby was bathed and dressed in clean clothes. It was felt best to leave her drawing in her bedroom and despite everything, humming one of her made-up songs. She needed time to adjust - a luxury Lexie no longer had.
‘What are we going to do, McCall? Just tell me.’
‘Well, you can’t stay here but wherever Ruby’s going to live, a move to somewhere new isn’t going to be easy, not for her or anyone else.’
‘I’d take her to Bristol but my flat isn’t big enough and I’ve got the business to run and I still get offered parts and I can’t afford to turn them down.’
‘So you’d be for putting put her into a council home, then?’
‘Don’t say it like that, it sounds as if I don’t care.’
‘And do you?’
‘You know full well I do but my whole life is being turned upside down.’
‘What about Ruby’s life? Hasn’t that been turned upside down?’
‘Of course it has but I’ve never had the responsibility of a child before, let alone one with all Ruby’s problems.’
‘Like the doctor just said, she needs calm and stability to give her any chance of coping with everything that’s gone on.’
‘Don’t we all.’
‘Yes, and that’s why we need to get help.’
‘But where from, sweetie? I can hardly sleep from worrying about it.’
‘I was thinking that maybe we should ask Hester.’
‘Your charlady?’
‘Housekeeper, Lexie. You mustn’t underestimate her.’
‘I’m not but she doesn’t look like she’s moved on since Woodstock.’
‘Maybe, but for all Hester’s kooky ideas, she’s a woman of real humanity.’
‘So you’re saying Ruby might move up to Garth and live there?’
‘She’d be with family and friends in a stable environment so I wouldn’t see the welfare authorities objecting.’
It took a moment before a look of relief began to cross Lexie’s face. And through the door of Ruby’s bedroom came her endlessly repeated dirge… and all will be well and all will be well and all will be well, well, well.
*
Hoare was taken from his flat by two men with unreadable faces who could have doubled as funeral mutes. It wasn’t a police car waiting outside for them but a black London taxi. Special Branch used them on surveillance jobs - but how come he warranted one?
His captors sat on the fold-down seats opposite so he couldn’t see the driver. They pulled out into heavy traffic. All his demands to know who was taking him where were ignored. He felt breathless, unable to see outside the tinted windows and seized by claustrophobic stress.
Within ten minutes, they’d turned left down a ramp between two tall buildings. A metal portcullis rolled up to admit them to an empty underground car park.
The mutes led him through the semi-darkness to a metal gate in a far wall. They locked it behind them and descended a concrete stairwell.
*
The battery on McCall’s mobile was dead. He left Lexie and Ruby and went to look for a working phone box. He dialled Hoare’s bedsit to tell him they were decamping to the Welsh borders. But there was no reply or to his mobile. McCall tried his direct line at the Yard and heard the click of his call being diverted automatically. A man said Hoare wasn’t there and asked who was calling.
‘Just a friend. We’re working on something together.’
‘And what might that be, Sir?’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll catch up with him later.’
McCall then rang Hester to tell her about Ruby - her talent as an artist, the suicide of her mother, of going missing then being found in the very place where she pretended to be a princess with a pet unicorn.
‘It’s all down to this condition she’s got, Asperger’s syndrome.’
‘I knew a boy in the States with it. They can be extraordinarily talented kids.’
‘Trouble is she doesn’t like change but we need to leave the flat tomorrow.’
‘And then what?’
‘Well, if she doesn’t throw a massive wobbly, we’ll bring her up to live at Garth.’
‘OK, I’ve understood everything,’ Hester said. ‘I’ve an idea how I help. Give me an address and I’ll be with you around breakfast time.’
*
Lexie wasn’t the jittery type. But Etta’s occult junk made her nervy, despite being boxed up ready for the weekly rubbish collection. Even the exaggerated shadows of people passing the frosted glass of the door to the communal yard scared her that night. She wished McCall hadn’t gone out.
It was still hard to believe he’d stay to help her care for Ruby. Most men would jump ship if a kid as difficult as her became part of the arrangement.
Lexie was too on edge to sleep. She needed a drink. There was ice and tonic in the fridge and the remains of a bottle of gin in the living room. She poured a decent measure and went to play one of Etta’s videos to take her mind off the uncertain future.
On the shelf above the TV was something of Lexie’s past - a VHS of Blow-Up, the ultimate time capsule of style and paranoid intrigue from London in the swinging sixties. Its packaging was scuffed as if Etta had watched it a lot though whether with sisterly pride or jealousy, Lexie couldn’t know.
But Blow-Up was the first movie in which she’d appeared, if only briefly. That didn’t matter. There she would be - forever young, dancing at a Yardbirds gig as the film’s beautiful, boyish lead, David Hemmings, ran off with bits of a guitar Jeff Beck smashed against an amp. Such days did she remember.
McCall had idolised Jeff Beck once. He would’ve loved to have been on that shoot. But they’d split up by then and he’d taken it badly. She could still remember a line from one of his tortured letters… when all of life turns into winter, heroin is a fur coat and a kiss on the darkest of nights. She felt guilty at that. But she was meant to. Then Evan sorted him out. Evan sorted out everyone eventually.
Lexie took a sip of her gin and tonic. As she did, something within the ice cube which shouldn’t have been there, caught her eye. It looked for all the world like a tiny frozen teardrop. She put the cube on the palm of her hand. Her skin felt on fire. The ice turned to water and slowly gave up its secret – a tight little twist of cling film.
She peeled it open with care. Inside was the narrowest curl of paper, barely an inch long. On it was written the name Mr Ginger in blue Biro.
She’d heard of this New Age fad - sealing the name of some feared or hated person in an ice cube to freeze out whatever threat they posed. But she’d never seen it done. This was Etta’s doing without a doubt.
But who was Mr Ginger… and why had she been afraid of him? Was this another clue from beyond the grave about Etta’s puzzling life and disturbing death? Lexie believed the tarot cards under the bedroom poster had been just that.
Yet if she told McCall about the ice cube find, he might think Lexie had written the name herself to create a drama. If not that, he’d just sneer and say it was only more proof of Etta’s foolish ways.
Mr Ginger was best kept wrapped up for now.
Twenty-Two
&
nbsp; ‘Sit down, Hoare.’
‘Why have I been brought here?’
‘Because you’re in a damned big hole.’
‘Would that be the one you’ve just thrown me in?’
‘It’s not us who’ve been stealing documents from a police investigation.’
‘But what gives you the right to break into my flat?’
‘I do the questions and you do the answers. We find it works best like that.’
It would’ve been a gross misjudgement to think the interrogator’s weary insouciance hid any lack of resolve. Hoare couldn’t fail to note the hard, grey eyes of a man approaching a pension but who’d clearly given orders under all manner of fire.
‘I still want to know who you are,’ Hoare said.
‘Let me see… I’m someone who could make or break you. Now, can we get on?’
Hoare’s interrogator read from a file of typed notes. They sat either side of a desk in a windowless cinder block office lit by a neon tube humming above them.
‘Says here you’re overdrawn at your bank and behind with the maintenance and mortgage payments to your ex-wife.’
‘Can’t deny that but isn’t debt the curse of the age?’
‘Giving you every reason to make money on the side… like betraying the trust of the police who employ you and selling inside information to some rubbishy tabloid.’
‘There’s not a word of truth in what you’ve just said.’
‘Wasn’t truth whatever your newspaper decided at morning conference and all you had to do was go out and prove it, irrespective of whatever really was the truth?’
‘Look, where’s all this leading?’
‘For you, probably to prison for perverting the course of justice and for theft.’
Three pictures were slid across the desk towards him - black and white ten by eights, shot with a long tom lens and showing Hoare leaving Etta’s funeral with Lexie and McCall.
‘Tell me more about the man you’re with here.’
‘Are you spying on him or me?’
The Convenience of Lies Page 11