Criminals

by Margot Livesey

  If someone had sat down beside him on the bus—Joan, for instance—he could’ve come up with a story, no problem. He’d felt dizzy in the toilet, put the baby down for fear he might drop her, and the bloke had nicked her while he was getting a breath of fresh air. And then, poor old Kenneth with his dodgy health, he’d got on that bus to prevent him making a getaway. Something like that. Nothing that’d happened so far had anything to do with him.

  The part he was proudest of came when they all got off the bus. It was pouring cats and dogs. “Occasional showers,” he thought contemptuously, and hurried to shelter in the doorway of the cinema. The bloke followed, squeezing Grace in one arm, clutching his luggage in the other. Kenneth got a good look at him—scanty hair, wishy-washy blue eyes, expensive specs, and, surprisingly, unshaven. Briefly he seemed to look back, registering Kenneth’s existence in a way that was both flattering and alarming. Then a car hooted and the man stumbled towards it. He, his bags, and Grace disappeared into the blue Fiat. Nothing happened. It was too far and too rainy for Kenneth to see in. Were they talking? Necking? Having an argy-bargy about Grace? He stood at the corner of the cinema steps, listening to some girls gabbing, and waited.

  Maybe five or ten minutes passed before the driver’s door opened and a figure jumped out—a boy, he thought, until she began to run. And this was when his brain started working. Blessing the rain, which made haste natural, he hurried after her. Halfway down the main street, she turned into a shop. It was a chemists, the old-fashioned sort where you always had to ask a deaf assistant several times for anything embarrassing. Kenneth pretended to study the toothpaste while this woman—close up she wasn’t bad-looking, with her spikey hair and black togs—whisked around buying armfuls of nappies and lotions and tinned milk. He saw her hold out a twenty-pound note to the assistant and say something, but he couldn’t catch her words.

  He waited until she’d left the shop before approaching the cash register with the cheapest tube of toothpaste, fifty-seven pence. “Was that Mrs. Mayall?” he asked, naming his mother’s downstairs neighbour.

  “No,” said the assistant. Her dangly earrings sparkled as she put the toothpaste in a wee baggie. “That was Mrs. Lafferty from Mill of Fortune.”

  “What’s that—a telly show?”

  She laughed. You could probably whisper this one a request for a packet of Durex, not that it’d make it any easier. “No, a house. Out towards Glen Teall. Her husband’s a writer, Chae Lafferty. Maybe you’ve seen him in The Scotsman?”

  “Okey-dokey,” Kenneth said. “That rings a bell.”

  As he came out of the shop, the blue car drove past, spraying him with water. Wankers, he muttered. He watched until they turned right at the crossroads and vanished. Then he noticed the pub across the street was open. He went in and asked for a phone book. Like his visit to the bog, this gesture was lit by satisfaction. No one can call me gormless now, he thought. That was what his mum called him, a gormless wonder, every time he lost a job. He paged through to the L’s. Bingo, there was Chae Lafferty. He borrowed a pen from the barmaid and wrote down the number on the chemists’ bag. Then he ran and caught the bus just as it swung through the square on its journey back to Perth.

  This time it was his turn to sleep, and he woke, refreshed, only when they bumped into the station. He didn’t exactly have a plan, but inspiration was lurking. The bloke with a suit had dough, that much was clear, and maybe a chunk of it could fly out of his pocket and into Kenneth’s. Five hundred quid came to mind as a useful, liberating sum. That’s all Kenneth was thinking—no harm to Grace, no harm to Joan.

  Some people might have said he had things back to front: people paid to get babies back, not the other way round. But that was where the inspiration came in. Last week on the telly they’d been talking about this baby in the States, just an ordinary baby, as far as he could tell, not shitting gold or anything, and all these folk wanted her. They were spending thousands of dollars on solicitors, trying to prove what good parents they were, so a judge would say she belonged to them. Well, it was baffling—who in their right mind would want Grace bawling her head off?—but thank God Kenneth knew about it, because that gave him the antennae to pick up the secret little signals he might otherwise have missed. The bloke in the suit was a toff, so why hadn’t he gone to the police or at least handed Grace in to Lost Property? And at the chemists, the woman had bought enough stuff to set up an orphanage.

  No, they wanted that baby. And from his own long experience, Kenneth could see they were moving rapidly from behaviour that was merely a bit iffy, like when you carry a Walkman round the shop for half an hour, twiddling the knobs and reading the tiny print on the back about Taiwan, to the outright criminal moment when you absentmindedly slip the machine into your pocket and push out into the chilly street.

  Chapter 8

  The man seated next to Ewan was already at work, typing away on his laptop, and did not even glance up as Ewan sat down. Nor did the woman across the aisle, deep in her Financial Times. Nothing could have made him feel more welcome. Here was the world as he knew it, ready to receive him. He’d had time at the airport to phone the office and leave Yvonne a message that he should be in by eleven. Once the plane pushed back from the gate, the burdens of both his lives, brother and banker, fell away. Of course Mollie was still going to need a good deal of help, but the hard part, persuading her to leave Mill of Fortune, was behind him. Within a matter of weeks she would be installed in his top floor, making sense of the three-storey house he had bought as an investment when he joined Churchill and Rose and had since often regretted for its echoing rooms. As for the other business, he and Brian had been unnecessarily alarmist. People made unexpected purchases all the time; such was the nature of the market, and no cause for concern.

  And Olivia, by the time he got to the office, would be safely in the hands of the police or, better still, some motherly social worker. In Mollie’s company he had quickly grown accustomed to his unusual find; now, as the woman to his right turned to the European news and the man to his left studied a row of figures, he imagined himself politely interrupting them. Oh, by the way, guess what happened the other day? I found a baby in a bus station. He opened his briefcase and fished out his notebook. At the top of a blank page he wrote: Banker finds Baby in Bus station, pleased by the alliteration of his achievement. He must ask Mollie on the phone tonight if he needed to make a statement.

  Even as he imagined telling his anonymous neighbours, the person he really wanted to tell appeared before him. All weekend he had done his best to keep thoughts of Vanessa at bay, but here she was, as vivid as if he had never forgotten her for an instant. I found a baby, he would say, and pictured her sitting a little straighter. The first thing he remembered noticing about her was not her dexterity with numbers, nor her smooth high forehead and marmalade-coloured hair, but her posture. Years of Victorian education—boards down the back, books on the head—must have gone into producing such easy, supple uprightness.

  He reached up to direct the air nozzle into his face. Just as he’d overreacted to Brian’s phone call, so he had read too much into not seeing Vanessa these last few weeks. Cancelled meetings happened eight days a week in the City. Given the possible dividends, it was stupid not to at least try to discover whether she might reciprocate his feelings. If the answer was no, then there would be plenty of time to dismantle his affection, to push it slowly back, like Zeno’s arrow in reverse, until she again became a normal business acquaintance. Meanwhile, he thought briskly, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He jotted that down too.

  As the plane lifted into the air and banked steeply over Arthur’s Seat, it came to Ewan that his sister was right; he was thirty-three and in need of a wife. He raised his pen, tempted to add this to his list. Install double glazing. Find a wife. Help Mollie move. He remembered how she’d teased him about his propensity for list making. Instead he wrote Phone Vanessa, put an asterisk beside it, and took out his calculator.

  Chur
chill and Rose had offices on the sixth floor of a newly renovated building near Finsbury Circus—within a stone’s throw, Ewan had heard a colleague claim, of the Bank of England. A well-struck golf ball would’ve been more accurate, by his estimate, but he liked the narrow streets with their mixture of old and modern buildings and the sense of being part of the bustling mercantile history of London, a city he had long compared unfavourably to Edinburgh yet was gradually growing fond of. When he arrived, Yvonne was on the phone. “Mr. Munro is with a client, sir,” she said as he hung up his jacket and tucked his bag between two filing cabinets. “Yes, I’ll see he gets your message as soon as he’s free.” She pressed down the button and turned to Ewan, still holding the phone. “Mr. Lopez is in a state,” she said. “For a change. How was Scotland?”

  “Fine. It’s a braw day,” said Ewan, putting on an accent. He saw that Yvonne already had one pen emmeshed in her thick grey hair. Sometimes by the end of the day she would have three or four sticking out—like an Edward Lear character, Ewan teased her—and one of his duties was to remind her to remove them before leaving. “Any major blowups?” he asked.

  “The usual. You have some faxes from Milan, and there’s a meeting with Tony and Jack at two-thirty to discuss the budget for the Dryden account. Don’t worry, Jack isn’t having a business lunch. I checked.”

  The phone rang again, and Ewan went to fetch coffee. Nothing here could be so terrifying as his sister hurling a mug to the floor.

  It was lunchtime before he had a chance to tell Yvonne about his weekend. She had been his secretary for nearly three years, and Ewan dimly recalled feeling sorry for her at the interview. She stood five foot ten and might be described as “Rubenesque.” Now the idea of anyone pitying Yvonne was ludicrous. She spoke five languages, was dazzlingly efficient and the wife of a man who built violins; together they played in a chamber group. During the last month she’d spoken to Mollie several times on the phone and become privy to the whole mess. When Ewan announced he was thinking of going north, she immediately endorsed his decision, urging him to take Friday off and booking him a sleeper.

  “So,” she said, coming back from getting them tuna sandwiches and mineral water. “Any hope of a reconciliation?”

  Ewan shook his head. “Absolute zero, I’m afraid. Mollie’s so upset she can hardly bring herself to say Chae’s name. Apparently he ran off with someone else, heaven knows who. I’m not even sure where he’s living these days.”

  “Oh, I hate stories like this. I hope she sues him for every penny and the lint in his trouser pockets too.”

  “It turns out there aren’t really any pennies. They all went on la vie bohème.” He explained the plans for Mollie to stay with him and take a computer course. He kept expecting Yvonne to interrupt, to say this was precisely what Mollie needed, but she listened in silence, eating steadily. “Don’t you think computers are a good idea?” he said at last. “Well paid and flexible?”

  “Yes, yes, I do,” Yvonne said. “Sorry, I was woolgathering.” She drank some water. “I was remembering how desolate I was after I broke up with my first husband. I didn’t want to be with him, but I found going home at night to an empty flat unbearable. I remember telling my sister my life was over. Then I signed up for French classes and met Jean-Pierre.”

  “Isn’t Nick your first husband?” Taken aback by her casual admission, Ewan barely heard the rest of her remarks.

  “Third.” She smiled. “I’m a slow learner. Does Mollie have any friends here?”

  “She claims to have no friends anywhere.”

  Yvonne popped the last of her sandwich into her mouth. “That can’t be true, though she probably needs a few new ones. Oops, here we go.” The fax machine was whirring again.

  Later Ewan thought it was this conversation that had turned him into a criminal. Or more accurately, revealed him as one. If he was as innocent as he claimed, why didn’t he mention finding the baby to Yvonne? It was an obvious piece of news and she, unlike his companions on the plane or the phantom Vanessa, was the obvious person to tell. No, at some level he had known all along what was happening. But he could not bear to confront his sister.

  Whatever second chances there might have been for confiding were demolished by the message that awaited him after the budget meeting: Call Brian Ross. He glanced over to where Yvonne was typing up the report he’d written at Mill of Fortune. Never before had he found her proximity inhibiting. Sometimes he even waited for her to return to her desk before making difficult phone calls. He watched her lean forward to decipher a cryptic note and continue moving her nimble fingers. Reluctantly he dialled Brian’s number.

  “Ewan, hang on a sec. No, send it over pronto, two copies. Yes, right away. Sorry about that. Thanks for phoning back. How are you? Did you see the article on Japan in the FT last week?”

  For several minutes they discussed individual versus corporate identity. Come on, come on, thought Ewan, his nervousness increasing with every meaningless phrase. “At least the Yamoto group is flourishing,” Brian said. He cleared his throat. “I had David Coyle on the phone this morning.”

  Once Ewan had been in Oxford Street when an IRA bomb went off; only a small bomb, no one had been hurt, but the sensation of everything being briefly blown out of his mind was not dissimilar to the effect of Brian’s remark. David Coyle worked for the Serious Fraud Office. “What did he want?” Ewan said, striving for calmness.

  “The activities of one of my clients have come to his attention. In fact the one I mentioned to you, who invested so heavily in Gibson Group stock.” Brian paused; somewhere a phone was ringing. “I thought maybe you’d like to know,” he went on. “I suspect he’ll be calling you soon, if he hasn’t already, and it’s always good, in these situations, to be prepared.”

  The Boy Scout motto, Ewan thought ironically. “No, he hasn’t called me yet. Well, I’m much obliged to you, Brian. Frankly I’ve no idea what’s going on.” He trailed off. Just before the silence became truly awkward, he said, “I was north for the weekend. The home country is looking grand.”

  The conversation ended in a burst of Scottish nostalgia. “We’re daft to live down here,” Brian said. And Ewan agreed. Only after he hung up did it occur to him that he had got through this entire difficult dialogue without a trace of stuttering.

  When Ewan finally got home to Barnsbury, it was past nine. He ate some toast, turned up his heating, and switched on the television without sound, then phoned Mollie. As he dialled, he thought of the solitary phone call of his visit; some kind of an argument, he guessed, judging from Mollie’s demeanour, but with whom and about what remained a mystery. On the BBC news, several cars lay askew beside a road, and while he waited for her to answer—the phone rang at least a dozen times—Ewan had ample opportunity to imagine her blue car careening off the A9. “Hello,” she said, much too loudly.

  “Mollie, it’s me. Sorry not to call sooner. How are you? You got home safely?”

  “Yes, I’ve become an ace driver again. And I stuck a big sign on the back door: ‘Have you put the car in the garage?’ Pity I didn’t do it sooner.”

  “Better late than never. What happened about the baby? Did they have a report of one missing?”

  He heard her knuckles crack. “No, no one seems to have lost a baby. I think they were a bit taken aback—a baby, you know—but it all went smoothly.”

  Smoothly, pondered Ewan, and hoped this meant his earlier picture of a motherly social worker was true. “Do I need to make a statement?”

  “Not at the moment. I gave them your name and address, and they said they’d be in touch if they needed more information. Was the flight okay? Your desk?”

  “More or less. I do have to go to Milan tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” said Mollie, and for a second he could have sworn it was an exclamation of relief. “For how long?”

  “A couple of days. I’ll be back on Friday at the latest. I’m mostly going to coddle the investors and eat osso bucco.”


  “Is this your famous row?”

  “No, just the usual chaos.” He stopped and found himself gazing through the window into the dark, dishevelled garden. He would’ve liked to confide in Mollie, to hear her burble well-meaning, ill-informed remarks, but even to mention Coyle seemed a dangerous act. The aptly named Coyle, Ewan thought, and imagined him like a cartoon character, growing larger with each utterance of his name.

  “If I’d known you were going to Italy,” Mollie said, “I’d never have made lasagne.”

  “Nonsense, your lasagne is delicious. Listen, I didn’t get a chance to call the removal company today. Do you think next week will be soon enough?”

  “That’ll be fine. I’m not going to be ready for at least—”

  There was a stifled cry, followed by total silence.

  “Mollie! Mollie, are you all right?” Damn, that stupid isolated house.

  “Sorry, Sadie went berserk. Maybe the fox is back, looking to see if we’ve anything else on offer. They say dogs can smell them over half a mile away.”

  “Although I don’t remember her barking when the ducks were killed,” Ewan said, then fearing he’d been tactless, quickly added, “If you’re all right, I’d better go and pack for tomorrow. I’ll try to give you a call from Milan. If you need to reach me, for any reason, call Yvonne. She’ll have my number. I told her your plans, and she’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I can’t wait. She sounds terrific.”

  “Yes, she is,” he said, pleased if a little startled by her enthusiasm. “Thanks for your hospitality. I know I made a fuss about coming, but I had a lovely time.” Now the feeling of dread was like a light shining on all his other feelings, making them stronger and more vivid. He wanted to say something about how he understood she would miss the house, St. David’s Well, the moors; that he would miss them too. Since their parents died, Mill of Fortune had been his home in Scotland. The scarcity of his visits had been in inverse proportion to his attachment. All this shimmered before him, hopelessly beyond speech. I’ll write her a letter, he thought. They said their goodbyes, and he added it to his list of tasks.