Zac strolled down Magnolia Hill towards Lewisham High Street, his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his Levi’s. He wasn’t a bloke to brood over things, but he was brooding now. He knew, when he walked to freedom through Parkhurst Prison’s high security gates, that he was going to have to play safe for a bit before haring off to New Zealand, but things were getting a little complicated. Not so complicated he was going to change his plans completely; he couldn’t do that. New Zealand was where his share of the robbery he’d been jailed for was safely stashed. He had to go to New Zealand and, from all that his Kiwi mates had told him about it, once there he was going to want to stay.
The initial problem had always been how he was to get there, for there was certainly no point in getting there if the police were watching him in the hope he would lead them to unrecovered money. Whether they were suspicious that he knew where his share was waiting for him, or whether they believed him to be as ignorant of its whereabouts as they were themselves, he had no way of knowing. It was, however, a risk he had long ago decided he had no intention of running, which was why Jack Robson’s offer of a billet and boxing work, all within spitting distance of the Thames, had fitted so well into his plans.
When he left Britain, he was going to do so inconspicuously, and the most inconspicuous way possible was as a deck-hand aboard a cargo boat. He already knew from conversations with Leon which were the docks used by boats from Australia and New Zealand, and he’d had dummy seaman’s papers stowed in his wallet for over two weeks.
With springy athletic precision in his stride, he rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill, pondering the two hiccups in his plans, one of them minor, the other roaringly major. From the far side of the High Street, old Charlie called out a greeting to him and he grinned and waved in response, his thoughts still on the first of his problems. The last thing he wanted to do, before sailing down the Thames bound for the Southern Hemisphere, was to attract police attention. Yes, that was exactly what Jack’s plans for him were likely to do, for the rozzers would love nothing better than to be able to nab him for taking part in a pirate fight.
Aware of a very interested gaze from an exceedingly nubile young woman, he ignored it, frowning slightly. He didn’t like letting Jack down. He liked Jack. And under other circumstances he’d have relished an illegit match. There was nothing like an illegit fight, with lots of his mates’ money riding on his back, for generating an atmosphere of almost unbearable fizz and excitement. As it was, though . . . He crossed the road to the tiny traffic island dominated by Lewisham’s clock tower. The risk of the fight being busted by the police was one he didn’t want to take. Jack had been ashen with frustrated anger, but Jack’s anger hadn’t budged him from his decision. He had a whole new life waiting for him in New Zealand, and he wasn’t going to put it at risk for the sake of making Jack, and Jack’s mates, a bundle of money.
He paused for a second by the clock tower, traffic speeding past him on either side. His other problem wasn’t one that could be so easily solved. Carrie was avoiding him like the plague. He looked over at the market stalls stretching from just across from where he was standing, all the way up the High Street in the direction of Catford. It wasn’t because she wasn’t as crazy about him as he was crazy about her, he knew that. Rather, it was because she was so crazy about him that she was going to every length possible not to be alone in his company. The trouble was, it was a ploy he couldn’t allow her to carry on indefinitely. There simply wasn’t the time for it, for when he left for New Zealand he wanted to do so knowing she would join him there, that travelling a more direct route than himself, she might even be there, waiting for him when he arrived.
With several female heads turning admiringly to watch him, he strolled across the road. The Jennings’ fruit and veg stall was one place Carrie couldn’t escape from him, and he visited it two, sometimes three times a day. ‘I need lots of fresh fruit and veg to keep my strength up for the ring,’ he said to her when she asked him what the heck he was playing at, buying enough fruit and veg every day to sink a ship.
His reasoning had cut no ice with her at all. ‘Then bloomin’ well buy them somewhere else!’ she said, her hands thrust deep in her pinny pockets as if afraid he was going to seize hold of them. ‘Nibbo sells fruit and veg. Why don’t you buy it off him, for a change?’
‘I’m not in love with Nibbo,’ he said, laughter in his voice and undisguised heat in his eyes. ‘But I am in love with you, and you’re in love with me. Why try to pretend otherwise?’
She flushed scarlet and was saved from answering by a customer irately rattling an empty carrier bag and demanding to be served with a stone of potatoes.
‘Hello there, Mr Hemingway,’ Ruth Giles said pleasantly, crossing over from the market side of the High Street to the clock tower’s traffic island. ‘Have you seen the Coronation Day decorations the council have begun putting up everywhere? Lewisham is going to look very festive, isn’t it?’ Despite the light-heartedness of her words, she didn’t look light-hearted. There were heavy shadows beneath her eyes and he suspected that, like many other Magnolia Square residents, she was worrying herself sick over the mystery of young Matthew Harvey’s whereabouts.
‘It’s going to look smashing,’ he said, wondering if he would still be in the country by the time Queen Elizabeth was crowned.
Ruth smiled and continued on her way, her pearl necklace, plum-coloured twin-set and plaid skirt looking oddly formal amongst the headscarves and cheap and cheerful get-ups of her fellow shoppers.
Zac negotiated his way between a box that had once held apples and a giant bag packed with onions. He was going to get Carrie into bed with him before the week was out if he had to throw her over his shoulder and stride off with her, cave-man fashion, in order to be able to do so. Grinning at the thought and looking forward to it exceedingly, he strolled to where she was captive behind a mountainous display of crisp, fresh produce.
The instant she saw him approaching she froze, but not in horror. He could practically see her heart beginning to pound and her blood beginning to race. His own heart was pounding with the same kind of intense excitement he felt when he stepped into the ring on a big fight night. He loved Carrie Collins. He loved her voluptuous curves, the wild tumble of her gypsy-dark hair, her totally unstriven-for sensuousness. Most of all he loved her blazing honesty and her warm, generously loving heart. He stepped towards her, noticing the bruised fruit she would never try to sell and that lay at her feet discarded. Something tightened within him. Carrie wouldn’t have to stand amongst rotting fruit when they were in New Zealand. Once in New Zealand they would have money enough to live like royalty. In New Zealand, Carrie would never have to work again.
‘Hello sweetheart,’ he said, uncaring as to whether anyone was within earshot or not. ‘Let’s close the stall down and spend the day on the river. There’s a lot I have to tell you and it’s going to change your life. It’s going to change it for ever.’
‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,’ Jack said bitterly to Mavis. ‘The match is all arranged and word of it is out. There’s no way it can be called off.’
‘And no way, without Hemingway fighting for you, that you can make on it?’ Mavis asked, unable to bring herself to refer to Zac by his Christian name.
‘Hell, no!’ They were on the North Downs, sitting on grass at the edge of woodland, with a magnificent view of the Weald stretching before them, the Cadillac parked on a little-used country road some thirty yards away. ‘I’m going to have to replace Zac with Big Jumbo and, as no one will expect Big Jumbo to win the fight anyway, there’s no way money can be made by him throwing it.’
‘And no way money can be made by him winning it?’
Jack plucked a long blade of grass. ‘There’s an outside chance, I suppose,’ he said glumly, ‘but the idea of the match was that we wouldn’t be gambling on an outside chance. The idea was we’d be gambling on a certainty.’
Mavis slid down on to her side,
resting her weight on one elbow, regarding him thoughtfully. ‘And you still don’t know who’s going to be in the other corner?’
Jack chewed on the blade of grass, not looking towards her but gazing out over a heat-hazed view of small woods and fields and meandering streams. ‘Nope,’ he said, his thoughts too full of Christina for him to be overly concerned. ‘That’s the trouble with having a middle-man for illegit fights. You often have to go in to them blind.’
‘Crikey!’ Mavis said expressively, noting how springily his hair curled in the nape of his neck and how suntanned his skin was, so suntanned she ached to brush it with her lips. ‘That’s a bit of a risk, isn’t it?’
With his hands loosely clasped around his knees, Jack looked towards her, saying wryly, ‘It wouldn’t be if Zac was fighting.’
Mavis thought of Zac’s powerful physique and the way he hammered the speed-ball in the gym and, though she hated his guts for the way he was causing chaos in Carrie’s life, she knew that Jack was right to have such confidence in his abilities. Any opponent of Zac Hemingway’s would be swaying on his feet like a tree in high wind before the first round was even halfway over.
‘What about the club?’ she asked, changing the subject, her fingertips burning with the need to reach out and touch him. ‘Are we still opening Friday?’
With great difficulty, he thrust his thoughts of Christina to the rear of his mind. Wherever she was at the moment, she’d be back at her mother’s by the time he and Mavis were back in London and, after he’d dropped Mavis off in Magnolia Square, he’d drive straight down to Greenwich to see her. For the moment, however, he was out in the countryside enjoying a breather he badly needed.
‘We do, indeed, still open on Friday,’ he said, his devil-damnme grin back on his face, ‘so I suggest that for the rest of the day we play, because there’s not going to be many more chances to do so. What do you fancy, love? A pub lunch in Chevening or a picnic by the river at Edenbridge?’
‘I fancy you,’ Mavis said starkly, deciding to risk everything and go for broke. ‘And I think it’s high time I had a little of what I fancy, don’t you?’ And, her eyes holding his, she slowly and purposefully began undoing the buttons of her blouse.
Chapter Sixteen
Daisy sat morosely by the pond in Greenwich Park, waiting for Billy. The pond was their regular meeting place for, if Billy had simply wandered up the square and called for her at number four, the entire world would have known he was regularly doing so and that their relationship had undergone a radical change in character, and Daisy didn’t want the entire world to know. She was an intensely private girl, and she didn’t want the likes of Hettie Collins and Nellie Miller discussing the pros and cons of her and Billy becoming sweethearts, and she certainly didn’t want Lettie Deakin chin-wagging about it to all and sundry in The Swan.
In her school uniform, her arms folded around her knees, she sat on the slightly rising ground on the south side of the pond, deep in unhappy thought. Over the last few weeks life had done nothing but grow more and more complicated. She and Billy ought to have been deliriously happy, but they weren’t. How could they be, when the mystery of Matthew’s disappearance grew deeper and deeper with each passing day? Tears stung the backs of her eyes. As if the agony of not knowing where Matthew was, and if he were safe or not, wasn’t bad enough, worry over him had triggered off all sorts of other unexpected miseries. Her mum and dad, for instance. Her mum and dad never argued, or not that she’d ever been aware of. Her dad had the sunniest nature imaginable, and her mum was serenity itself. Now, however, her dad’s lovely dusky face was crumpled with lines of worry and fatigue. He’d begun wondering if, having run away from St Osyth’s, Matthew couldn’t face the thought of returning home and confronting them; that, irrationally, he felt too ashamed to do so.
It was a line of reasoning Billy was unable to understand, but then Billy didn’t know Matthew like she and her dad did. Ever since he was seven years old, Matthew had been a boarder at St Osyth’s, and as a consequence no one in the square really knew him, not like they knew her and Luke and Jilly and Johnny. And what they didn’t know was how sensitive Matthew was. It would be quite typical of Matthew to feel that his running away from school was behaviour that would have hurt his parents and, though even she couldn’t quite understand why he should be hiding away for so long, stewing over it, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that that was exactly what he was doing.
It wasn’t her dad’s hope that this was the explanation that was causing so much added distress, though. Rather it was the inexplicable sense of tension that had suddenly sprung up between her mum and dad. As far as she and Luke could make out, it was all to do with their mum having gone down to St Osyth’s to speak to Matthew’s headmaster by herself, and without telling their dad that she was going to do so.
‘Didn’t you think I was capable of handling the situation?’ he said to their mum with a bitterness in his voice none of them had ever heard before. ‘Did you think it might be better if he could forget about Matthew having a half-caste West Indian for an adoptive dad?’
Neither she nor Luke were able to believe what they were hearing. Their dad’s colour had never been an issue between their parents, yet their mum hadn’t denied the allegation. All she had said was, ‘I went on the spur of the moment after you had left for work, Leon. I went because I thought I was acting for the best,’ and then, to both their horror and their dad’s, she had covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking as sobs had convulsed her. Their dad had put his arms around her and comforted her, of course, but there had been something strange in the atmosphere ever since, an extra tension that was almost unbearable. And now, as if that weren’t bad enough, there was a similar tension between herself and Billy.
‘Why don’t you want people to know I’m your boyfriend?’ he asked, perplexed. ‘Why does it matter if anyone sees me giving you a lift to and from school?’
‘Because I’ll get teased about you being a scrap-metal merchant,’ she wanted to say and, because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, did not say. ‘Because I’ll get hassle from my teachers for not concentrating single-mindedly on my school-work.’
What would happen when she went to university? Would he be understanding about the number of years she would be away from Magnolia Square and about the long periods of time during which they wouldn’t be able to see each other?
She hugged her knees a little tighter. She could well imagine what his response to the last little problem would be. He would take time off from his business and, if she was lucky enough to be at Somerville, would drive up to Somerville College, Oxford, in his scrap-metal lorry in order to see her. A light breeze ruffled her short bob of glossy black hair. She wouldn’t feel ashamed of him – she couldn’t feel ashamed of Billy, she simply wouldn’t know how to – but she was honest enough to know that if such a scenario took place, she would feel self-conscious. Billy, amongst Oxford’s dreaming spires, would be as out of place as . . . as . . . as her dad no doubt felt whenever he visited Matthew’s snobby public school.
There came the sound of someone running down the slight incline behind her, and she turned her head, her eyes meeting his.
‘Hello, love,’ he said breathlessly a few seconds later, flopping down beside her. ‘Have you been here long? Did you get away from school early?’
‘Last lesson was a free period. I’ll do the work I should have done in it at home, tonight.’
His run down the slope had disarranged his artfully coiffured quiff and he took a comb from his jeans hip pocket in order to flick it back into shape.
‘Yer should’ve told me and I’d have met you from school. I was over Blackheath picking up a load of old piping from the milk depot.’ He put the comb back in his pocket and slid his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close, wishing he could kiss her but knowing it would only rile her if he attempted to do so. Kissing in public, when she was in school uniform, was a misdemeanour he’d never b
een able to persuade Daisy to commit.
‘Do yer fancy coming with me to watch the fight next week?’ he asked, not very hopefully. ‘It was supposed to be Zac who was fighting, only now I think it’s going to be Big Jumbo. Whoever it is, Jack’ll be looking for support.’
Even though she tried not to, Daisy shuddered. Despite her dad’s involvement with the Embassy Boxing Club, boxing was a sport she couldn’t stomach.
‘But your dad won medals galore for boxing when he was younger,’ Billy had once said to her, mystified.
He had, and it made not the slightest difference. Though she thought her dad the most wonderful man in the world, she couldn’t share his passion for boxing. To her, there was absolutely nothing edifying at all in two men climbing into a roped ring with the sole purpose of pounding each other unconscious.
‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she said, wishing she didn’t feel so low about everything; wishing Matthew were at home; wishing her mum and dad weren’t at odds with each other; wishing her academic ambitions and her feelings for Billy didn’t seem so incompatible. ‘I really can’t understand why you would want to watch Zac Hemingway or Big Jumbo fight, especially when it’s not even a legitimate fight.’
‘Hardly any good fight is,’ Billy said, reasonably. ‘And it isn’t as if it’s criminal, like burglary or fraud, is it? It’s only against the law because someone says it’s against the law. Your dad’s as honest as they come, but I bet he’ll be there. Or he would be if Matthew wasn’t missing.’
Daisy was in no mood to argue against the rights and wrongs of pirate boxing matches. Like tax evasion, it seemed to be one of those things that a lot of otherwise law-abiding people perceived as being morally OK, even if it wasn’t legally OK. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said with quiet firmness. ‘I’ve masses of schoolwork to catch up on and—’
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