Nameless

by Jessie Keane

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So, am I forgiven?’

  He loved her. There! He’d said it. ‘There’s something else. My brother died. You must have heard.’

  ‘Charlie?’ He was watching her face. ‘Yeah, I did. You and Joe must be pretty cut up.’ His mouth twisted. ‘But then, the same thing again. I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, and this is the first I’ve heard of it from you.’

  I’m not cut up, thought Ruby. But it was too long and too painful a story to discuss. She really didn’t want to talk about it. Joe had called her, told her about the accident. Charlie had wandered drunk out into a road and been knocked down. The driver hadn’t stopped.

  She knew she ought to feel sorry. This was her brother. But really all she felt was relief. Relief that, at last, Charlie was really, properly gone.

  106

  ‘We’ll have the wake at our place,’ said Joe. ‘Give the poor bastard a proper send off.’

  Betsy agreed willingly, much to his surprise. He knew how she’d hated having Charlie around. But then – a chance to show off her house, her possessions, to all their mates? She couldn’t pass that up. If she’d objected, it could have turned nasty. Big as he was, and tough as he was when it came to managing his manor, he had been pussy-whipped by Betsy for his whole married life and he knew it. What Betsy wanted, Betsy usually got. But – for once – here she was, being all agreeable.

  Charlie’s death had upset him, the sheer stupid futility of it. He found the funeral hard to get through. All the breakers and the part-time boys and their wives were there at the church to pay their respects, then everyone went back to his place in Chigwell. Before very long Betsy, forgetting the solemnity of the occasion, was preening herself in a three-hundred-pound black skirt suit and showing off her latest fixtures and fittings to all the other girls.

  Ruby was there too, wearing a sober black jersey shift dress, a simple string of pearls and black court shoes. She hadn’t wanted to come, but she knew that her absence would look strange so she had been forced to attend.

  ‘You’ve got to go,’ Vi told her when she confessed to her closest friend how much she was dreading it.

  ‘Why? They’re bound to be talking about Charlie, saying what a great bloke he was. He was horrible. A bloody monster. I can’t face it.’

  ‘Yes, you can. You’re his sister. If you didn’t show up, how would that look? Just tough it out. That’s all you can do.’

  She knew Vi was right. But still, it was torture and she couldn’t wait for it to be over.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ said Joe in a quiet moment. ‘I’ve got Charlie’s belongings, I’m wondering what the hell to do with them.’

  ‘What belongings?’ asked Ruby. She didn’t want to even think about Charlie’s things, far less see them. ‘There can’t be much, can there? He wasn’t long out of prison. Just stuff his things up in the loft and forget about them.’

  ‘Bets don’t like old rubbish about the place. You know her, this house is a bloody show home.’

  Ruby looked at him. So fearsome, Joe Darke was. And yet henpecked by a five-foot-nothing woman. Joe’s big pudgy face was troubled. For the first time, Ruby noticed the black stubble on his jaw was flecked with grey, and his hair had turned white at the temples. There were hollows like tramlines on either side of his mouth, a perpetual frown etched on his brow.

  He’s getting older, Ruby thought. Hell, we all are.

  ‘I could do with a hand sorting through it, Rubes. We’re all the family he had, you and me. I don’t want to do it on my own.’

  Bugger it. She didn’t want to do it, but look at him: Joe was really upset by all this.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

  Joe was right: there wasn’t much left of Charlie’s. His meagre belongings were in a bag in one of the guest bedrooms; they spread everything out on the bed and stood there, staring down at the bits and pieces – all that was left of a life lived on the wrong side of the tracks.

  There was a little double photo folder; a hunter pocket-watch with a low-grade chain and sovereign attached; a black comb, ingrained with greasy dirt; some socks, underpants, trousers and shirts that had seen better days; a bank book with bugger-all in it; and a woman’s cheap hair slide.

  ‘What a load of tat,’ said Ruby, picking up the slide and turning it over in her hands. ‘Except for the watch and chain, I suppose.’

  ‘That was Dad’s. I’ll keep that. And what about that thing. It’s a woman’s hair slide, isn’t it? Don’t know whose it is. There’s not much else.’

  Ruby put it down with an inner shudder. She didn’t know why Charlie had kept such an odd thing.

  ‘I know it’s all useless, but I can’t just sling it, can I? Think you’re right. I’ll just put it all up in the loft, out of Betsy’s way.’

  ‘Put what out of Betsy’s way? What you two doing in here?’ said Betsy, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘Just sorting through Charlie’s stuff,’ Joe said quickly.

  ‘What for? Hurry it up, we’ve guests downstairs – I can’t manage this lot on my own.’

  ‘Sorry, babe. We’ll be right down.’

  ‘What’s that . . . ?’ asked Betsy, coming into the room and peering down at the slide. Her lips tightened as she looked at it.

  ‘Bugger me.’ Betsy picked it up and turned it over in her hands, her face sneering. ‘I bet that’s hers.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Ruby, curious.

  ‘That ugly cow he kept sneaking off to during the war. She got blown to kingdom come one night, German bomb. And good bloody riddance, I say.’ Betsy flung the slide back onto the bed. Her cheeks were pink with irritation. ‘Rachel Tranter, that was her name. Married to that spiv. You remember, Joe?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Joe. ‘I remember Tranter and his mob.’

  ‘He was always sneaking off to see her,’ said Betsy, her mouth twisted. ‘Sodding cow.’

  Joe’s face was expressionless, but Ruby thought this must have hurt: Betsy’s obvious annoyance that Charlie had pursued someone else, not her.

  ‘All water under the bridge now,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Yeah.’ Joe heaved a sharp sigh.

  ‘Hurry it up, will you, Joe?’ Betsy snapped, and left the room.

  They listened to the tap-tap of her heels as she hurried back downstairs to her guests.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Ruby, picking up the brown cardboard folder. ‘Photos?’

  She flipped the thing open; Joe was busy stuffing everything else back into the bag.

  Ruby caught her breath. In one side of the folder was an image of a man who looked very like Charlie – obviously their father, Ted. And in the other side, there was a photo of another face she knew. She was looking at Daisy.

  Joe glanced at her. ‘What is it . . . ?’ he asked, peering over her shoulder. ‘Oh. That’s mum. Never took Charlie for a sentimental sort, did you? He must have had that for years.’

  Ruby stared at the photo. Of course, Joe was right. The clothing, the colour of the print, the carefully staged nature of it, the dated background – this wasn’t, couldn’t be Daisy. She’d never before seen a photo of her mother. There had never been any on display in her father’s house.

  ‘Dad must have kept that, passed it on to Charlie,’ said Joe while Ruby just stared at it.

  ‘But they never had any time for her,’ she said at last.

  ‘Didn’t mean they didn’t love her though, did it?’

  ‘Dad said she was a disgrace.’

  ‘Come on, Ruby. His old lady had been giving the ride to a black jazz-club trumpet player.’

  ‘Only because he mistreated her.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I knew him. He mistreated me too, remember?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Joe looked almost shame-faced for a second. ‘He loved her, Rubes. But he hated her too. She’d made a public fool out of him by presenting him with a half-black baby. How d’you suppose he must have fe
lt about that? And then it just got worse, didn’t it? All that anger between them, it was never resolved. She died having you. Complications. So all that rage in him just went on . . .’

  ‘And was directed at me,’ finished Ruby, her eyes angry. ‘I know.’

  Joe sat down on the bed with a sigh. ‘It’s all past and done now, Rubes. All that bad blood, all that bad feeling. It’s done. It’s gone.’

  Ruby closed the folder gently and clutched it to her breast. ‘Can I keep this?’ she asked, feeling choked. Her mother had looked so young, so hopeful in the picture. Just like Daisy did today.

  ‘’Course you can.’ Joe stood up. ‘Come on then, let’s get back down there. I suppose we’d better show willing.’

  107

  When Ruby got back to Marlow that night she felt wrung out. It had been a hard day, making nice and smiling pleasantly when people told her time and again what a ‘diamond geezer’ Charlie had been. She was so pleased to get home – but that pleasure was roughly cut short when she went to unlock the front door.

  Suddenly she was shoved violently from behind. Reeling with shock and from the savagery of the impact, Ruby fell forward into the hall, striking her elbow and the side of her head on the polished marble floor.

  Pain rocketed up her arm. Her head literally spinning, she looked up in abject terror and saw a man standing over her, dressed in dark clothes, gloved up, his face hidden by a knitted mask. She could only see his eyes, which were piglike and mean.

  She was being burgled.

  ‘I don’t have any money here,’ she blurted out, her heart rocketing in her chest, trying to crawl away.

  He knelt down, grabbed her hair and whacked her head down against the floor.

  Ruby shrieked.

  ‘I don’t want your money, cunt,’ he growled. ‘I’m delivering a message.’

  A what? Ruby, eyes watering, her face twisted with fear, could hardly understand what he was saying. His accent was thick Glaswegian, and further muffled by the mask.

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’ she managed to get out.

  ‘Oh, you will.’ He whacked her head once more against the floor. ‘I said, I’m delivering a message. You keep away from Daisy Bray, or trust me, bitch, you’ll get more than a bang on the head next time. You got that?’

  ‘What the . . .’

  ‘Got it?’

  Her head where he was gripping her hair so hard was agony. But despite the pain, despite her terror, fury started to stir in her. Daisy was her daughter. Vanessa and that bastard Cornelius, what right did they have to do this, to try to stop her having contact?

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘I’ll . . .’ Her voice was wobbling, trembling. Tears of anguish were flooding down her cheeks. She didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to stay away from Daisy. She couldn’t.

  ‘Say it, bitch.’ He shook her head. She felt strands of hair coming loose from her scalp, wondered if she was bleeding.

  ‘I’ll leave Daisy alone,’ she gulped out.

  ‘Good. Make sure you do.’

  He thumped her head back down against the floor. Pain exploded once again, she screwed up her eyes and thought Stop, please just stop.

  When she opened her eyes, there was no one there. The front door was standing open, admitting the cool, still night air. She was laid out on her hall tiles, shuddering with rage and crying in pain.

  Her attacker was gone.

  108

  ‘And that’s all he said? Just that – “Keep away from Daisy”?’ asked Michael, chain-smoking with ferocious concentration.

  She’d phoned him moments after her attacker had gone. He’d come straight over, two of his boys arriving with him – she recognized Kit, and Rob – and she had never seen him looking so angry.

  Ruby sat there with him in her own home and thought she would never feel safe again. Her head ached, but more from tension than from the impact with her hall floor. The man had pulled out a chunk of hair from her scalp, and yes, it had bled a little. Her elbow was throbbing, but she thought it would be OK. She would live. But would she ever again feel safe here?

  ‘That’s all he said,’ she murmured.

  ‘What was he like? Can you describe him?’

  ‘Mean piggy eyes. A thick Scottish accent. He had a mask . . .’ Ruby shuddered and ground to a halt.

  ‘You think this is Cornelius?’ asked Michael.

  Ruby looked him dead in the eye. ‘Of course it’s Cornelius. This is my fault. I was getting close to Daisy. I went to Brayfield with her, I was just going to the gatehouse, that was all, and I thought Vanessa was away, but she wasn’t. Daisy insisted we go up to the house to call in on . . . on Vanessa.’ She had nearly said her mother. But Vanessa wasn’t Daisy’s mother. She was. ‘I could see that Vanessa was furious. And she would have told Cornelius.’

  ‘And so he got someone to pay you a visit,’ said Michael, pacing around the room.

  He felt sick to his stomach at the thought of anyone having the gall to do this to Ruby. If this was Cornelius, then damned sure it was one of Tito’s boys who’d done the job on Ruby.

  Fuck it.

  This situation was getting out of hand. He did business with Tito, they were tied together in all sorts of ways and also on a new deal on the London Docklands Strategic Plan. He wished to Christ they weren’t, but there was no way of getting out of it now.

  The old docks, once a prime target for Hitler’s weapons during the war, were now largely defunct because the new giant container ships couldn’t get up the river. They had to stop at Felixstowe. This meant that everyone who was willing to buy in – and there were huge government incentives to do so – was now sitting on eight square miles of prime building land. There were fortunes to be made. Tito and Michael were on their way to becoming millionaires.

  But . . . now this. Michael felt soiled by his links with Tito. He’d always disliked the man, who swaggered around town puffed up like a toad on his own self-importance. But there was no way, at this late stage, to extricate himself from the deal. And there was no way he could break his word, his solemn promise to his dead wife. He couldn’t. He turned, stared at Ruby. She looked subdued and vulnerable.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here on your own. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Ruby. She wasn’t, not at all; but she liked her independence. Hell for her would be moving into that flat of his. She’d bought this big Victorian villa and furnished it with care. This was her home. She’d worked hard for it, she loved it. She wasn’t about to be scared out of it by Cornelius Bray.

  ‘Ruby . . .’ Michael was looking at her as if she was crazy.

  ‘Stay the night with me,’ she said.

  ‘Of course I will. But after tonight . . .’

  ‘Let’s think about that tomorrow.’

  And it was nice, sleeping in his arms, waking with him; she knew she could get used to it.

  She awoke early – she always did – and he was still there, sleeping soundly beside her, brown-skinned, muscled, but somehow almost vulnerable in sleep. She slipped quietly from the bed, feeling the twinge of resistance in her arm from yesterday. She touched her head, was aware of soreness there, but nothing too bad. It could have been so much worse, she knew that.

  Ruby pulled on her dressing gown and crept out of the master bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen. Dawn was breaking, spilling multicoloured light onto the hall floor through the stained-glass panels on either side of the front door.

  She found herself looking at everything differently now. She loved this house so much, but perhaps she should have stayed in her apartment over the store. Maybe she needed better locks; maybe those exquisite stained-glass panels beside the front door would have to go.

  But then – how could she have stopped what happened? Her attacker had been hiding outside, somewhere in the shrubbery; she’d been taken completely unawares.

  ‘Oh!’ Someone was in the kitchen. She clutched a hand to her chest as she saw the tall, muscular dar
k-skinned man standing there, his white shirt hanging open, wearing black trousers and a tousled look as he paused in pouring hot water onto a mug of instant coffee.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kit. ‘Did I startle you?’

  ‘No, you’re fine,’ said Ruby, although he had. Her heart had burst into a gallop when she’d seen him there; but it was just Kit, after all. ‘Can you do me one of those?’

  ‘Sure.’ He took down another mug from a hook on the dresser. Then he looked at her. ‘Sorry. I wake early, just needed a drink.’

  Actually, he hadn’t slept properly ever since the Tito thing with Gilda. He still missed her, and mourned her bitterly, and was wracked with guilt over her death.

  ‘It’s OK, make yourself at home,’ she said, and went over to the big marble-topped island in the middle of the room and perched up on a stool, pulling yesterday’s paper towards her and scanning it briefly. Evonne Goolagong had beaten Margaret Court in the women’s singles at Wimbledon, and some Russian cosmonauts had died in their Soyuz spacecraft. Tens of thousands of people had turned out in Red Square to pay their respects. And the submarine HMS Artemis had sunk in Portsmouth harbour, trapping three sailors on board. The same old mixture of misery and glory.

  ‘Did Rob stay the night too?’ she asked Kit, pushing the paper aside.

  He nodded, busy with the coffee.

  ‘You both sleep OK?’

  ‘Fine. You take it black?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No.’

  He brought the two mugs over to the island and put them down, pulled up a stool.

  ‘Feel a bit better now?’ he asked, his eyes scanning her face.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘The boss was very upset. Someone trying that on you.’ Kit took a sip of the coffee. ‘So what was it about? You got any idea?’

  Ruby thought of saying it was nothing. She didn’t particularly want to relive it right now. But she liked Kit, and she knew Michael trusted him implicitly.

  ‘I was being warned off contact with Daisy,’ she said.