Cut Out

by Marcia Woolf

  “Have you seen your brother recently?”

  “No. We spoke on the phone on Sunday, same as usual. I’m going to see him in a few days. Haven’t arranged it yet.”

  I wasn’t too thrilled at the way the conversation was going and tried to steer us away, but Dirk’s no fool.

  “I take it Ollie here is the reason things are a bit cool between you and Jack?”

  Ollie stood up to leave at this point but I flapped my hand at him to stay put.

  “You could say that.”

  Dirk smiled.

  “Well, in that case, I’m even more delighted to meet you, Ollie. You’re in the police force?”

  “Yes. DCI.” He gestured towards Dawn. “DI Sayler’s my colleague. We’re both in Fraud.”

  Dirk seemed even more satisfied.

  “What’s the expression? Any friend of yours is a friend of mine?”

  Ollie smiled, nervously. I wasn’t used to seeing him wrong-footed like this and I realised it was because Dirk was acting like he was my father. Which, as we’d already established, he wasn’t. I tried to get a handle on the proceedings.

  “Dirk, forgive me, but why exactly did you want to meet up tonight? I mean, it’s great to see you, and I’m very pleased that you’ve had the opportunity to meet Ollie and Dawn but—”

  Dirk looked at the other two in turn.

  “How much do they know about your family? About your father?”

  At this point I nearly choked, because for a second I thought he must be talking about Hayden, but then I could see he was referring to the paternity business.

  “Ollie knows. I haven’t told Dawn. Sorry Dawn, nothing personal. I just didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  Dirk nodded. “Do you mind, if Dawn knows?”

  “Not really. Well, it depends what you’re going to say.”

  Dirk reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a small velvet bag tied with a matching navy cord. He released the knot and tipped the contents into his palm.

  “You know what this is?”

  “My mother’s locket.”

  “Correct. She left it to Dora in her will, along with the other jewellery from her dressing table box.”

  “So?”

  “Have you ever looked at this locket carefully?”

  “No, why would I? It’s not very interesting; just a plain gold locket. I don’t think she ever wore it. My father gave it to her, didn’t he, on her twenty-first birthday?”

  Dirk looked me very hard in the eye while I worked out the implications.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Exactly. Now, if I open this locket...” and he slid a perfectly manicured fingernail into the little catch at the side and very delicately prised it apart. He held it towards me like an oyster.

  “Dora told me about this when you were on your way back to London. She said Shirley had told her the very same thing: that this locket was given to her by your father. Now, if Shirley was telling the truth in her note, the locket can’t have been a present from Hayden. And I think it’s correct that she had it from the age of twenty-one, because the date is engraved here on the inside rim, so she received it several years before you were born. All of which leads me to conclude that this lock of hair in here isn’t yours: it belongs to your real father.”

  I felt sick. Dirk held the locket closer to me and I reached out and touched the tiny curl of reddish blonde hair, coiled like a soft spring inside its unexceptional case. Neither Dawn nor Ollie spoke a word, but there was so much tension in the room it felt as though a guillotine was suspended over us. Dirk said, softly, “You know what this means, don’t you, Cookie?”

  I looked at Ollie for corroboration. He inspected the contents of the locket and bit his lip.

  “Yes,” I said. “We can test for DNA.”

  “But, you realise, this can only tell us who your father is if we can match it to someone.”

  I stared at him.

  “You said it wasn’t you.”

  “It isn’t me.”

  He carefully closed the locket and returned it to its pouch, and then to his pocket.

  “The thing is, Cookie, there is only one person I can think of who might be a match.”

  For a few moments I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I caught sight of the look on Ollie’s face and I could see what he was thinking. Maybe he’d been thinking it all along. Like I said, there are some things you can never be ready for, and some things it’s better not to know. Dirk reached over and put his hand on top of mine, and said the two words I truly didn’t want to hear.

  “Rudy Bannerman.”

  I shook my head.

  “Rudy will never agree to a test.”

  Dirk raised his eyebrows.

  “I think he will. He’s very keen to get his hands on some more of the family’s money. That self-serving bastard will be only too pleased to have his mouth swabbed.”

  “Hey,” I said, “that’s my father you’re talking about.”

  Dirk burst out laughing, and Dawn and Ollie joined in, probably out of relief.

  “You’re taking it very well.”

  I wasn’t. I wasn’t happy at all. In fact, I felt more like throwing myself off the balcony than making a joke about it, but what could I do, now the beast had raised its ugly head?

  Ollie interrupted.

  “Just a minute. Before we – you, I mean – go trying to get Bannerman to take a test, why don’t we do the simple thing and get Cookie and Jack’s DNA compared? I mean, nobody knows for sure, do they, if Mrs Garrity was right? Maybe she was mistaken.”

  “Mistaken?” I said. “I doubt that very much. She might have been lying, or meddling to start a family fight, that’s more like it. But you’re quite right, Ollie, we should check first before Bannerman gets his hopes up. What do I need to do?”

  “I can get the lab to run the test. We just need a sample from you, a mouth swab, and a sample from Jack. It might be tricky if he doesn’t know why you’re asking for it, though.”

  “What about something else? You can test hair, right? So what about, say… a tooth?”

  “A tooth! What the hell are you on about?”

  “I’ve got one of Jack’s teeth.”

  The three of them looked at me like I’d done something terrible. I had to laugh.

  “Oh, please. I haven’t been torturing him. It’s a milk tooth, a baby tooth. When it fell out, I suppose he was about seven, Jack put it under his pillow, like you do – for the tooth fairy. My mother saved it in a little container: God knows why. Will you all please stop staring at me like that! You must know what I mean: one of those little silver keepsake things – baby’s first tooth. Anyway, for some reason I’ve had it in the bottom of a bedroom drawer for years. Couldn’t you test that?”

  Dirk shook his head.

  “Unbelievable.”

  Ollie shrugged.

  “Okay, hand it over. I’ll see what we can do.”

  As I was hunting around in the bedroom for the tooth I could hear them all laughing: in fact, guffawing would be the right word. I even heard Dirk – I’m sure it was Dirk – say something like holy relic. Oh, very funny. What a lot of weirdos we are, the Garritys.

  I finally got them all out of the flat just after midnight. Dirk was in a very jolly mood; it seemed the task of putting Rudy up as a candidate for paterfamilias had been significantly eased by the company, the conversation, and the Rioja. They weren’t exactly singing but they all bundled down the stairs together like old friends after an excellent party, leaving me standing in the hallway. I shut the door, locked and bolted it, and then caught sight of myself in the mirror. The lighting isn’t great in our hallway. I’d sort of noticed that before, but it had never been important. I leaned a bit closer, then stepped back. Not good. Not good at all, Charlotte. A couple of faint lines were starting to settle around my eyes. Cheeks not as peachy as they used to be. I pushed back my hair and gazed long and hard at myself. We all get older. If only
, I thought. If only I wasn’t starting to look quite so much like Shirley.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thursday 27th November

  Paperwork

  The next morning, I went into work as normal and did what they were actually paying me to do, until everyone was sufficiently out of the way to let me do some more snooping. Then, for the first time, I spotted him. Ash Kumar. He was a lot younger than I’d expected, but still greying slightly at the temples. He pretended to be busy with a message on his phone, but wasn’t exactly Oscar-winning material. He glanced at me as I passed him on my way up the first set of steps into the building. I paused by the in-house coffee shop and said hi to the barista, flirting while he bagged up a Danish and tried to get me to buy a latte to go with it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kumar sidle in and then pretend to join the short queue at the main reception desk, like he was there for a meeting. Okay, I shouldn’t have done it, but I was annoyed with the man for being so incompetent. I marched straight towards him, high heels clicking on the marble, and held out the bag with the Danish in it. Startled, he took hold of it instinctively and stood there, open mouthed.

  I smiled.

  “You might get hungry, while you’re waiting.”

  Kumar grinned, like he didn’t know what I meant.

  “Thanks, but it’s a short queue.”

  I looked him up and down. Cheap tie to go with the cheap suit. Nasty shoes.

  “I meant,” I said, loud enough for the rest of the queue to hear, “while you’re waiting for me.”

  The front entrance security guy looked up, stopped checking entry passes and strode over, earpiece crackling.

  “Is there a problem?”

  He reached out and very lightly placed his hand on Kumar’s upper arm with the practised grip of someone who could hoist Kumar off the ground and out through the revolving doors in one smooth movement.

  “Yes,” I said.” This man is following me, Duane.”

  Kumar raised his free hand, the one not still clutching the brown paper bag, in a kind of ‘I surrender’ gesture.

  “I’m a police officer,” he hissed.

  Immediately, Duane let go of his arm and Kumar tugged his sleeve straight indignantly. Then he added, “She knows perfectly well I’m a police officer.”

  Seeing that Duane wasn’t entirely convinced, Kumar yanked out his ID card and waved it about an inch from Duane’s face. Poor Duane just stood there and let him do it.

  “Unless you’re here for any particular purpose I suggest you go back to the station and have a cup of tea with that,” I said, prodding a finger at the paper bag. Then I turned on my heel and walked off towards the escalators, fully aware that every single person in the lobby had stopped what they were doing and was watching me as I travelled steadily upwards and out of sight.

  It amused me all morning. Every time I thought about Ash Kumar and his soggy pastry I giggled to myself, which must have made Lucy wonder what was going on, although she didn’t ask. Still, I knew Ollie would be furious, and I’d have to work on a contrite expression before we met up again in the evening. I was quite looking forward to it, and not just because he was going to stay the night. (He didn’t know that yet, but he was.) No, it was more that he’d asked one of the specialists on his team to run the data from the Ferdinand sheet through some financial modelling software to see how a pyramid scheme would work. The more data I could find, the more accurate it would be, so I was going through the rest of the files on Susie’s note to see what surfaced. Pleasingly, by the end of the day I had another three pages of names and percentages carefully scanned, printed out and returned to their hidey-holes. I was concerned when Nilsson approached my desk just as I was getting ready to go home. He watched as I turned off my computer and put on my coat.

  “I hear you had an altercation this morning, in the lobby.”

  “Nothing serious. Just a guy who seems to have taken a fancy to me.”

  “I see. According to the security guard, this admirer is a policeman.”

  I turned off my desk lamp and pulled on my gloves.

  “So he says.”

  Nilsson looked at me hard, then he burst out laughing. I joined in, since it seemed prudent.

  “Like that, is it?”

  “’Fraid so. He’s harmless enough, but I don’t want him hanging around making a nuisance of himself. I wouldn’t want him to get into any trouble on my account. He’s not... very bright. You know, a bit limited, intellectually.”

  Nilsson nodded at me benignly and then headed off back to his office. As I went towards the exit he stopped, turned and gave a brief wave of his hand.

  “So long as that’s all it is, Charlotte. We don’t want the police investigating us, do we?”

  Then he started laughing again, and closed the office door behind him.

  I must admit I was worried by Nilsson’s behaviour, not least because I’d have expected him to be a bit more upset about what had happened to Leach. He was pretty difficult to read at the best of times, but it wasn’t clear to me whether he was making a point. I considered whether he might actually know, for sure, that Kumar was a policeman and that he was definitely following me, which could only mean that he’d had a tip-off – or that the two guys in the grey car were working for Nilsson and they’d spotted Kumar. One thing was certain: Ollie would have heard all about it by now and there was going to be shouting over the cutlery. I decided to head him off at the pass by getting home before he arrived and slipping into an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  I heard the key in the lock shortly before seven and then the door closing with more force than strictly necessary. There was the sound of shoes being kicked off. He strode into the kitchen, face like Darth Vader’s stand-in. He’d launched into the lecture before I turned round, although he faltered when he saw the table set for two, candles, wine on ice.

  “What the hell do you think you’ve been doing?”

  Then he saw what I was wearing, and he stopped completely, immobile in the doorway.

  “Jesus.”

  He shook his head.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, Cookie? What is all this, eh? I am so sick of all this. You think you can get away with it, don’t you? Just doing exactly what you want to do, and sod the consequences.”

  He moved towards me and I backed away, remembering Jack when he was in one of those moods. Ollie stopped, realising, and retreated, palms outstretched.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t...”

  I felt terrible, as if I’d accused him of something just by stepping away, anticipating.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I’m just very, very angry with you. Don’t you ever stop to think before you pull a stunt like that? Today, after Kumar came back to the station, it was the worst day – absolutely the worst day – I have ever had on the force. I’ve had better days finding decomposing corpses.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  It was inadequate, but at least it was the truth. He drew out a chair and sat down heavily at an angle to the table, elbow resting on the cloth, like he wasn’t planning on staying. He pushed one of the plates aside and started drawing circles on it with his finger.

  “Cookie, this’ll finish my career in the Met. In the force. And not just me, either. Sayler’ll be lucky to keep her job. Even the Chief’s got a lot of explaining to do. The whole bloody department’s up in arms. Why, why on earth couldn’t you just have done what you were supposed to do, for once? You just had to go in, find some stuff, and come home with it. I’m toast. I am well and truly fucked now, thanks to you.”

  “You said you wanted to leave the force.”

  “Not like this! Not with a dishonourable and a disciplinary hanging over me.”

  I picked up the sheets of paper I’d brought back from the office and dropped them on the table by his elbow.

  “Here.”

  He glanced at them, picked the first one up and gave it a quick scan
.

  “Great.”

  “You think they won’t help?”

  Ollie let the pages drop again.

  “I have no idea. I suppose they might prove that Nilsson’s defrauding half of Europe. Or they might prove nothing, except that he’s very bad at adding up. It hardly matters now. If this case ever gets anywhere near a prosecution it’ll be a miracle.”

  “I see.”

  “No,” he said. “No, you don’t. You don’t see anything apart from yourself. I’m sorry, Cookie. Getting mixed up with you has been the biggest mistake of my life, which is a pity because I really, really love you. I’ve never had so much fun with anyone. It’s been great, fantastic, especially the sex. That’s been – yeah. I’ll probably regret this for as long as I live. I’ll always miss you and think about you and wish that things could have been different, but it’s over. We can’t go on.”

  He stood up, leaned towards me and kissed me on the forehead very lightly, just once. Then he turned to go.

  “Wait!”

  I snatched up the papers from the table and thrust them at him. He hesitated, then took them from me.

  “You never know,” I said.

  I waited, listening as he made his way into the hall, put on his shoes and clicked the door closed behind him. After a few moments I heard the letterbox open and the sound of a key falling onto the mat.

  Chapter Twenty

  Saturday 29th November

  Jacks and Spades

  On Saturday I went to visit Jack. Without Dawn in tow it took a good hour and a half to get through the process of patting down, hanging around, wait here, wait there, try to be patient, fail, read a book, wait a bit more. Eventually we were facing each other across a slightly sticky table in a room full of other sullen men and anxious-looking women, the air moist with sweat and disappointment. Jack, thinner than ever, sat back in his chair, arms folded. He wasn’t going to start the conversation, so I did.