Strangely, Henry was struggling to generate any empathy. The strain of the last few months had numbed him to those looks and to most of the other weapons in her emotional arsenal. So while she was standing there, attempting to wither him with her eyes, he used the opportunity to go on.
‘I’m saying this for everyone’s benefit. For yours and for hers. Her life’s been on hold and she’s emotionally traumatised. She’s sure Dan’s innocent. Wouldn’t you want to defend an innocent person?’
Camilla erupted now. ‘She’s incapable of being objective about that boy. I’ve told her she isn’t staying here if she chooses him over us, Henry. And I meant it.’
‘Us? I don’t share your view, Camilla. Why are you speaking for us when we have different feelings on the matter? I don’t agree with turning my back on my family regardless of anything they’ve done or not done.’ A pause while Henry calmed himself. His blood pressure felt too high. Angry red blotches were beginning to mark Camilla’s neck and she was breathing fire. He toned his voice down. ‘All I’m saying is, there’s maybe a better way of dealing with this. The more you push Naomi, the more likely she is to pull away. Leave her to make her own choice. She’ll do the right thing.’
‘Oh you think?’ she spat.
‘Yes, I do. And I’d like you to allow her space to do what she feels she must do. It’s a crucial point in her life.’
‘What about me?’ Her eyes pooled with tears and she whipped round to face the other way. ‘Where’s your loyalty?’
Henry deflated. All the air left him. ‘It’s with my family, Camilla, where it’s always been. With you and the girls.’ He waited. She said nothing and her head lowered. His tone was as gentle as he could make it. ‘Remember the problems with Annabel when you two didn’t talk? If she’d felt able to come home sooner, she may not be with Joel now. She turned to him when she didn’t feel able to come here.’
‘So now you’re blaming me for Annabel’s relationship and the fact that she’s pregnant?’
Henry sighed. ‘No, of course not. I’m not blaming you for anything and I don’t want you to blame me either. I’m saying we’re in a difficult position here.’ Understatement of the decade, from Henry’s view. ‘Let’s support each other where we can. Let’s allow room for people to act for themselves, even if they’re making mistakes. It’s how we all learn, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t go back to those dreadful times, Henry. Of being hounded by the press. Them taking strips off us without any conscience or sensitivity. It nearly broke our family.’
‘You’re being protective. It’s understandable, of course it is. But Naomi has to make her own decisions. Don’t drive her away. Please. Let’s remember the lessons of the past.’
The past. Always a risky word to dredge up with Camilla.
‘That’s exactly what I’m doing.’
Camilla wouldn’t listen to any more. Having claimed the last word, she headed for the door and thundered up the stairs.
10
Lorie spent the day in her room watching TV and occupying herself from the comfort of her luxurious double bed. She flicked between episodes of Modern Family and Friends, then Bargain Hunt. She drifted to sleep. She ate what was brought to her door. She was deliberately doing mindless things because she didn’t want to think. Thinking reminded her that her two cases were stuffed with everything she had, and that beyond that, she had nothing.
The oily-haired manager had gone home and wouldn’t be on duty until 8 p.m. she’d learned. Before he’d left, he’d visited her to confirm that all was satisfactory. She’d told him, yes, but that she’d need another night. Just one. He’d closed his eyes and agreed eventually, by way of a single, solemn nod. His mood changed though. After the nod, the look on his face said, why? Why was she still here, demanding things of him – hadn’t he done enough? Why on his watch?
Lorie didn’t care. He left. She closed the door and had a shower and climbed back into bed with wet hair.
Her phone was bothering her from the bedside table. It was too quiet. She kept glancing for messages, word from her mum. Nothing. She didn’t want to ring again. No point really. If her mum was sulking over the furniture being dumped, she wouldn’t want to be harassed as well. Best guess was that she was with Ted.
Lorie’s key to her mum’s house was at her flat, she realised, the flat that was no longer hers! So if Vincent had emptied the flat and thrown her things into cases, that key could be anywhere now. Lorie wondered what Vincent had done with her car, her precious Mini.
Which led to the next problem – Lorie had no way of getting to her mum’s. She’d have to get up and go to the bank and complain about the chewed card. She’d have to get money somehow.
Two hours later, Lorie returned to her hotel room having taken what she had from her bank account. Seventy-two pounds was all she had and no overdraft facility. She’d been promised a new card in the post. She’d given her mum’s address because she had no choice.
Her privileges from Vincent had dried up. He’d stopped putting money into her account. His final offer had been a home in Sydney, and she’d refused it and burnt the only bridge she had.
At four-twenty that afternoon, Lorie called the taxi company from the previous night and asked for Den Banks. Who? Den Banks, she’d repeated. He’d driven her the night before and had her watch. No one of that name works here, was the response. She persisted, described him, told the guy on the end of the phone what time she’d been in his cab, what had happened, but all he repeated to her was that he didn't know who Den Banks was. She cut the call and threw her phone across the bed.
‘Thieving little git!’
Lorie got up and found the trousers she’d travelled in and pulled out the taped up bit of paper containing Solomon’s last words. Her heart was anxious inside her chest, as if it knew something before her conscious mind did.
Thud, thud, thud.
She sat with it for almost two hours, until her intellect forced a fracture and then, in an instant the words seemed to collapse and then the meaning unfolded, leaving her stunned and breathless. The message, four short words long, meant just for her, thumped her in the chest.
She lay back and the room began to fade until her view had narrowed to the white painted ceiling. Lorie closed her eyes. It was as if Vincent had opened a door to a passageway, which branched into another avenue, then another and another. Snippets of conversations, things he’d said and done. Things she’d said and done. Layers of meaning assembling into a structure, something tangible. The more she discovered, the more her heart saw the need to pump violently in order to send life reserves to vital places.
Her friendship with Vincent had never been real. He’d used her and abandoned her and didn’t care if she lived or died. She opened her eyes and was surprised to find a calm hotel room, with a mirror opposite the bed and a phone beside it. She didn’t want to look at herself because she was worried about what she’d find, so she stretched out her arm to use the phone and suddenly found that she was uncoordinated. Her hand seemed uncertain about how to grasp the target and pick it up. She sat up and the room swayed a little. She couldn’t trust her limbs. With a determined effort, she called reception and asked for vodka to be brought to her room immediately.
Then she flopped back and threaded her fingers together and made an intense study of the ceiling, experiencing the strange sensation of her body flushing with enzymes. She had no words for the biochemical reactions raging inside her, she only knew that the ceiling was shifting, that her fingers were slimy with sweat and that her life beyond this hotel room was a great big black void.
***
The vodka was untouched by the side of the bed. Lorie was confused when she looked at it, sitting on a padded paper coaster, a black stick crowned with a solid plastic ring jutting from the glass, the ice long since melted. She couldn’t remember who’d brought it.
It was dark outside. The hotel window reflected the room like a mirror, and had closed the view to the
street outside. Lorie picked up her phone and hoped her voice would work. She managed to order a taxi, then she texted her mum. ‘I’ve nowhere to go, Mum. Coming over now. We need to talk.’ Then she dressed and left her room and bundled her cases inside the lift. It stopped on the ground floor and she slid out with them, into the reception area to wait.
The oily-haired man was back behind the desk, the top of his head gleaming beneath the glare of a bright chandelier. Lorie ignored him and he offered no eye contact at all. By mutual consent, neither wanted to acknowledge the other.
She slipped into the cold night and drew her coat around her, doubling the front and securing it tightly with a belt. The taxi crawled up on time, a huge black noisy thing which boasted free Wi-Fi in huge letters on the door. Not the same company as the night before, but she’d given a false name in case they’d blacklisted her. Besides which, it felt more comfortable to be someone else tonight.
She was ferried to her mum’s without conversation. The driver was shielded behind glass, which told its own tale about life in Manchester. He was cocooned in his own private space, preserving his life and listening to rock music, turned low. She watched the streets pass by, teeming with life and noticed those who congregated outside pubs and clubs and restaurants, to smoke.
She must have zoned out, then in again. Time had shifted forward and the streets and houses were familiar now. Houses she’d tramped past a trillion times.
She paid the fare and watched him leave. Her mum’s house was in darkness, a comfortless sight. She dragged the cases into the back garden and circled the house on foot. From the back, she could see a light on upstairs somewhere. The landing light, perhaps – the one her mum always left on at night whether she was in or out, asleep or awake. She knocked on all the doors and windows. The doors were locked; the windows sealed. If her mum was in, she was turning a blind eye. Lights were on upstairs in Ted’s house. She shivered and walked to the front of the house and opened the letter box.
‘Mum? Open the door. Mum? It’s me. Mother!’
When nothing stirred, she returned to the back garden. One side of it was lined by a double garage. There was a side door and window. She had no hope of finding the door open, but she tried it and was surprised when the handle dropped and the door pushed open. She flicked the light on. All her belongings were huddled together and piled on top of each other as if they were comforting one other, shocked to have been shifted. Seeing them prodded the first tears. The sum total of her life was here in this icy concrete shell. Near the garage door, crammed inside by millimetres, she found her Mini. And then the tears gushed.
So, good old Ted had helped out again, by cramming her stuff inside this cold shell and then claiming her mother. Jealousy took hold of her now. It took Lorie an hour of combing through her things and shifting items around, to find a small table that had been in the hallway. In the little drawer she found treasure curled in the far corner: her car keys and the keys to her mum’s house. She grasped them urgently and clutched them to her chest.
On cold feet, she hurried to the front door, key protruding from her fingers. A stiff wind cut through her clothes. It felt cold enough to snow. The sky looked close and heavy. She steadied her hand, slotted the key inside the lock and turned.
11
In the dead of night, it was a faint crunching sound that alerted Naomi to the fact that she was lying on top of her bed fully clothed. The air in her room was chilled, she noticed suddenly. She’d been in a deep trance, head full of pictures and dialogue, too lost to register that her hands and feet were almost numb and that the end of her nose tingled with cold.
She clasped her fingers together to reassure herself they were still there, and could barely feel them folded against one another. Then she anxiously snatched her phone. What time, what time? 2:47 a.m. So late? Early, more like. Time was marching. She couldn’t stem the flow of minutes piling upon minutes and the hours stacking up like building blocks. Blocks of time, climbing toward dawn, toward the day.
It was here already, the day, ushered in by silence and stillness and – she glanced at the window – snow. Beyond the glass, fat flakes were hurrying as noiselessly as the passing seconds, an endless procession, dense and white. Her curtains were parted. The room was bathed in a surreal light. She shuffled to the edge of her bed and stood up and crept to the window to look out. For a night in early March, the light looked unnaturally bright outside. The lamppost beneath her shone a bright beam upon a glistening fleece of snow that stretched on and on, smothering the vast lawn, lining even the slimmest limbs of the naked trees and shrubs. The reflection from the ground made the sky look grey and not black; more like a dim afternoon than night time.
Naomi wondered if anyone else was witnessing this glorious scene, or if she was the only one. She doubted that Dan would be able to see out from where he was. Was he sleeping, or was he staring at a stone ceiling trying to halt the passing hours as she was, unaware that the world outside was white?
Her eyes switched focus to short-distance. The flakes were dropping too quickly to fix on one at a time and the effort was uncomfortable. So her gaze blurred lazily into the moving mass and she focused long-distance again.
That’s when she noticed the footprints in the snow.
And that’s when she remembered the faint crunching that had roused her and brought her to the window. Feet against snow. Fresh snow, no longer pure, but soiled by a set of prints which she could make out through a flurry of snowflakes. They plotted a course along the driveway to the left of the lawn beside the row of laurels.
Without hesitating, Naomi stepped into the nearest shoes and grabbed a jumper while she headed for the door. She pulled the woolly over her head as she stole quietly down the stairs. Keys to the front door were on the small table in the hall. She swept them up on the move, unlocked the door and took the keys with her as she let herself into the front garden and closed the door behind her. Gusts of a chilled breeze cut through her clothes.
The footprints came right up to the door. She followed them, breaking into a run. Fury drove her forward. With life as it was, there was nothing to lose. With no thoughts for her safety, she sprinted up the drive following the footprints to the very end. Her right hand gripped the keys. They protruded from her fingers like daggers; an improvised weapon and probably ineffective, but the loose plan was to aim for eyes with her fist if necessary.
A car was pulling away from the house as she spilled into the road. Visibility was poor. She pursued it for ten metres or so, desperate to get a glimpse of the model or colour, maybe a letter or number from the plate. No chance at all. The car evaporated into the night until there was only silence again and a track of tyre prints and a blizzard of tightly-packed snowflakes tossing on a bitter wind. She slowed to a stop, her breath heaving from her in small clouds.
She shook her head in frustration and refrained from yelling. Who was visiting at this hour?
‘Is it you?’ she muttered, hands on hips as she breathed out white air and stared at the empty space where the car had just vanished. ‘Come out of your hiding place and face me.’
***
There was a pair of wrought iron gates at the top of the drive. She kicked them violently as she walked by.
Maybe security needed stepping up. With Nathan dead, Camilla thought that danger was a thing of the past. No one had set her straight. Solomon wasn’t on Camilla’s radar and Naomi hadn’t seen or heard from him during the long months since her wedding. The wedding that never was.
Down the driveway, the footprints – hers and the mystery set – were already filling, the patterns becoming more shapeless every second. By morning, there’d be no trace of them, no tracks on the road, no evidence of the intrusion. The colour of Vincent Solomon’s eyes were with her as she unlocked the front door. He was never far from her thoughts. She’d been to Solomon’s front door and hammered on it, certain that if there were any answers to the crazy mess surrounding Dan’s arrest that Solomon had somet
hing to do with it. Had everything to do with it.
But her visits were met with the peace of a tree-lined suburban street. Leaves fell from the trees on that first visit and painted the pavements in orange and yellow. The odd car skimmed by. But there seemed to be no life beyond Vincent Solomon’s dark front door. The drive was clear of cars and was littered instead with autumn leaves. Solomon wasn’t home.
So she’d gone to Rhapsody, the nightclub he owned, and leaned right into the face of Damien Carter – the guy who’d terrorised her in her first year of college and had the eyes of a shark, dead and glassy, and was built like an army tank. He wasn’t tall. He’d been standing on the door in a black suit, black tie, a wire looped around his ear and she’d glared right into those lifeless eyes of his and asked him where Solomon was. And he’d half-smiled, or at least his mouth had because his eyes were incapable of expression, and he’d swivelled his eyes and looked over her shoulder at his buddy who was dressed in an identical suit, and then he’d looked back at her and said two words and refused to say any more.
‘Go home.’
She’d repeated her visits three times, to the house and to the club. On the last visit, she hadn’t engaged with the guys on the door, but had dressed up and slipped into the club and followed the route that Dan had told her about when he’d first met Solomon. She could still hear his words in her head, guiding her to the private rooms only accessible to carefully selected staff, to Solomon’s players.
So she’d slid past a rope and down a narrow corridor away from the bodies and the noise, the last desperate attempt to find Solomon before the law crushed Dan. The corridor led to a black door that had no detail except a chrome handle. A security number pad was on the wall beside it. How stupid to think that she could access Solomon’s private space. Wasn’t it Solomon himself who’d told her how security-conscious he was, how he left nothing to chance, how he never gambled because he never lost?
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