“Not a replacement, then,” he said. “But you could use the money to… buy something else. Perhaps some flowers. For your Grandmother’s… resting place.”
A twenty quid bouquet? El thought. What world is he living in?
She felt better, after that, about choosing him. It certainly didn’t seem like he’d miss the cash.
She cupped her chin as if weighing up the possibility.
“I suppose I could buy her some china frogs for her headstone,” she said. “She always liked frogs.”
The man brightened, an end to it all in sight.
“You could,” he agreed. “Lots of frogs.”
She paused.
“Except…” she said.
The man stopped her before she could carry on - before the prospect of escape could disappear from view. He stood up, dug a thumb and forefinger into his wallet, pulled out four five pound notes and thrust them into her hand, which she’d left conveniently open, the palm turned upwards.
“Please,” he said. “For your Grandmother.”
She stood up next to him, preparing to protest. Never let the mark just give you money, the book had said. Not straight away. But he was already putting away his wallet, tightening the belt of his coat, getting ready to make a run for it.
“Are you sure?” she asked, the notes soft and rich as calfskin under her fingertips.
“Absolutely,” he said, half-stumbling in his rush to get away from her. “It’s my… pleasure. Now I’m afraid I really must…”
He staggered off, looking back at her over his shoulder as he lurched up the road. After a couple of hundred feet he turned and gave her a small, clumsy salute, before disappearing behind the gate of a big detached house, neat and whitewashed and decorated with what looked to El like a turret on one side of it.
She bent down to the ground again; picked up the box with the glass inside, and headed back towards the station.
At the top of Penshurst Gardens, where the pavement spilled out onto the Station Road roundabout, she became aware of someone watching her from across the road - a short white woman with a shock of salt and pepper hair, staring out at her from behind an enormous pair of Jackie O. sunglasses that half-covered her face. She saw El notice her, smiled, and waved back at her cheerfully.
El frowned, tucked the notes deep into the pocket of her jeans, and stalked away.
———
She didn’t spend the money.
There was nothing in the shops she wanted to buy - her Auntie and Uncle were pretty generous with pocket money, if only to convince themselves they were doing something for the poor little orphan they’d been lumbered with, and the library had all the books she could ever hope to read. She was too old for toys, wasn’t into music or clothes, and her Uncle was sufficiently lax with his cigarettes that she could acquire even those for free with the barest minimum of effort.
In any case, she thought, she hadn’t done it for the money. She’d done it to see if she could; if the things she’d read about would actually work, out in the world. The money was just… proof.
She knew, when she’d done it once - once it had worked, and that proof was in her hand, then in her pocket, then safely stowed away between the pages of a dictionary under her bed - that she’d do it again. She’d liked it - had felt a fizzing energy coursing through her afterwards like lightning, like a dab of speed on her tongue. And more than that, she thought, she’d been good at it - the money was proof of that, too.
So, the following Wednesday, just before rush hour, she did it again.
She’d needed a fresh piece of coloured glass - the initial shards having fractured beyond recognition after the hammer blows, the crash to the pavement and the innumerable accidental drops to her bedroom floor that had followed. But a replacement was easy enough to come by. She swiped it, as she had the first one, from the resistant materials cupboard in the school art room, wrapped it in the same cloth bag that had held its predecessor and carried it out of the school gates in her satchel, along with the hammer and the now-empty presentation box - through the streets of Burnt Oak and into the courtyard of the quiet block of flats opposite the Greater Barnet Library.
She perched on the same bench she’d sat on the first time, driven by an irrational but unshakeable worry that changing her pattern, changing the ritual surrounding the con would somehow alter its outcome. She raised the hammer above her head, as before; brought it down, as hard as she could, on the drawstring bag.
A shadow fell over the bench. She looked up; saw a woman standing over her, watching. Smiling.
She’d have recognised her anyway, from the smile and the dandelion perm, but as it happened the woman was still wearing her enormous sunglasses, now pushed up against the frizz of her hairline. Her eyes were vividly blue, crow’s feet gathering at their edges. El got the definite impression that the woman was laughing at her; having some private joke at El’s expense.
“I know you,” El said, not smiling back. “You were there the other day, up the road.”
“And I know you,” said the woman genially. “Or at least I know what you’re up to. You want to be careful - you’ll get your collar felt if you keep on with all this.”
The woman cast a glance down at El’s props: the bag of glass, the hammer, the presentation box.
If you’re ever questioned, the book said; if anyone ever suspects you’re up to something, or accuses you outright - deny everything. Then go on the offensive. They’ll quickly forget what they thought they knew once you have them on the back foot.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” El said. “And what do you want with me, anyway? You make a habit of following young girls about?”
The woman chuckled, still amused.
“I say something funny?” El asked, papering bravado over her growing unease.
The woman didn’t reply. Instead, she stuck a hand out towards El’s, and waited. After a moment, to her own surprise, El shook it. The woman’s grip was firm and certain; what her Uncle would have called an honest handshake.
“Ruby Redfearn,” said the woman. “I live just up there.”
She pointed upwards, to the flats overhead.
“You got a name?” she asked El.
“El,” said El, then kicked herself for replying.
“El?” said Ruby Redfearn. “What’s that short for, then? Eleanor?”
“Epsilon,” said El. “You got a problem with that?”
“Epsilon,” said Ruby Redfearn, rolling the name around her mouth experimentally. “Interesting. Your mother Greek, is she?”
El fell silent. Two years on, the memory of her Mum still smarted, as painfully as it ever had. Even the word “mother” stung; even when tossed carelessly, as now, from the lips of a stranger.
If Ruby Redfearn noticed, though, she didn’t react.
“Here’s the thing, El,” she said instead, shuffling onto the bench so that they were hip-to-hip, shoulder-to-shoulder. “Your little game with that box over there… you can’t keep doing it, at least not round here. Especially not if you live round here, which I’m guessing you do. Once, maybe twice you can pull it off without anyone talking or putting two and two together. But any more than that and you’ll be landing yourself in it. And then one day you’ll go home, and you’ll find an angry mob on your doorstep or the Old Bill sat in your kitchen. You don’t want that, believe me.”
El could feel her cheeks burning, her stomach knotting and clenching. It was too late to go on the offensive. She knew. Whoever Ruby Redfearn was, she knew everything. Might even have seen everything.
“Here,” said Ruby, not unkindly. “Don’t look like that. I ain’t going to say anything. There’s no benefit to either of us of me running my gob off about it. It’s just… if you do a job, you need to be clever about it. Careful. You need to cover your arse.”
Something about the way she spoke - the way she said “job” - caught El’s attention.
“How did you know what I wa
s doing?” she asked.
Ruby chuckled again - a rich, throaty laugh that made her eyes sparkle.
“Christ, gel,” she said. “You think you’re the first one round here who ever tried the Marchioness’s Gravy Boat? Do me a favour.”
El wrinkled her brows involuntarily, confused.
“What’s the Marchioness’s Gravy Boat?” she asked.
Ruby looked aghast.
“You’re doing it, and you don’t even know its name?” she said.
“The book called it a Melon Drop,” said El, embarrassed.
“Book? What book?”
El considered telling her - what she’d read, where she’d read it, the advice it had given her. Then thought better of it.
“Oh, I get it,” said Ruby. “You found one of them old instructional manuals, is that about the size of it? The Boy’s Own Book of Short Cons, that sort of thing?”
El stayed quiet.
“And you thought you’d try it out for yourself? See whether you could pull it off?”
It was close enough to the truth to be uncomfortable. El nodded, her earlier bluster now entirely evaporated.
“The trouble with books like that,” Ruby said, “is they don’t tell you the truth of it. They talk about the setup, and the logistics, the cold hard facts of the job and them bloody daft American names that make it sound like something from The Sting. But they don’t tell you the bits that matter.”
“Like what?” asked El.
“Like… that hungry look you see a mark get when he thinks he’s about to get one over on you - bit like a dog who’s just smelled the meat on next door’s stove. Like… you should never go to them, you should always get them to come to you, because they’ll want it more, and if you tell them no they’ll want it so bad they’ll never leave you alone until you give it to them. Like, and this one’s really important: you don’t ever shit where you eat, because the mark and you have both got to live there, and the last thing you want when you nip out to Woolworths is to see him staring at you with his mouth open down the pick ’n’ mix aisle.”
El replayed this advice in her head - plucking out the salient bits, teasing out the implications. She felt a little of her confidence returning - and, more importantly, felt the first, embryonic cells of an idea begin to form.
“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about,” she said eventually.
“More than that book of yours, anyway,” Ruby replied.
And here we go, El thought. You don’t ask, you don’t get.
“Think you might want to show me?” she asked.
Ruby pivoted around on the bench and fixed her eyes on El’s, holding her gaze just long and steady enough to give El a hint of the core of hardness that might lie underneath the geniality, a sense of what it might feel like to cross her and to have her know that you’d crossed her.
And then she smacked her thigh, and snorted, and grinned widely enough to show the metal of her fillings.
“Bloody hell,” she said, laughter in her voice. “I walked into that one, didn’t I?”
Chapter 3
Golders Green
1996
The waiter slunk back behind the bar. Ruby glanced across at him through the thickening haze of El’s cigarette smoke - making a show of wafting the smoke away with one liver-spotted hand, and causing the bracelets on the corresponding wrist to jangle together in a symphony of copper and gold.
“Them optics of yours look like they could do with a polish,” she said casually.
He took the hint - picked up a cloth from under the counter and, turning his back to them, moved to the other end of the bar and began wiping down the already-clean spirits bottles with furious intensity.
“100 grand?” said El, when he was out of earshot. “How did that happen?”
Ruby exhaled, the deep put-upon sigh of the world-weary diva.
“It weren’t my fault,” she said.
“I didn’t say it was,” said El.
“I was just trying to do something nice. For the boys. You know they’ve got their birthday coming up?”
El nodded.
“The boys” were Ruby’s twin sons, Michael and Dexter - 35, 6’3” and Savile Row-tailored, both long qualified as solicitors but still, for El, the gawky 17 year olds they’d been when she’d first stumbled her way into their living room. Dexter was glib and playful, all fast cars and ridiculous jokes, where Michael was serious and career-minded, as driven as his brother was irresponsible. Both treated El like a wayward little sister, warning her away from trouble and offering to have words with anyone who ever broke her heart. Both, she knew, would do anything for their mother - even, in Michael’s case, where it meant overlooking any professional codes of conduct and stretching his own ethics to breaking point.
“And you know they used to like the superhero in that comic - that Cloud Cheetah, or whatever its name is?”
El nodded again. The Cloud Cheetah, Dexter had once told her, had been his and Michael’s idol through the whole of junior school: a blue-skinned, Island Of Doctor Moreau-ish cat-man of uncertain origins, dedicated to fighting crime, upholding justice and foiling the nefarious plots of all and sundry villains in the London and Thames Valley areas. The Cloud Cheetah and his crab-like sidekick Five Eyes came alive in the pages of the Unimaginable! comic series in the late 60s and early 70s, before its publisher went bust - the quirky Britishness of its characters and settings, and the small budgets of its producer, no match for the glamorous Americana or the deeper pockets of its Marvel and DC rivals.
“Well,” said Ruby, “I was shopping round for something to get them, something really special. And then I saw two of them old comics come up at auction…”
Unimaginable!, as it turned out, was considered a bit of a rarity, even by the standards of comic book aficionados. Copies were scarce, pristine copies scarcer. To compound its appeal to the discerning collector, the Cloud Cheetah character had been identified a year earlier as the early, pseudonymously-produced handiwork of Brian Dennison, AKA Big Delta - a Pop Artist of some repute, whose accidental heroin overdose in 1993 had taken him permanently out of circulation.
The comics were expensive, with a guide price of £70,000 for the two, and interest was high - higher, anyway, than Ruby would have expected of something she used to buy with a bag of jelly babies and the Daily Mirror at the Deans Lane paper shop. But she, perhaps more than anyone, knew that the value of a thing - any thing - was as arbitrary as it was changeable, and so along she went to the auction house one evening, cheque-book in hand.
“I did it straight, as well,” she told El, leaning over the bartop to help herself to another lemonade. “Totally legit.”
She shook her head, disgusted with herself.
The auction was well-attended, the room peopled with the younger, male comic book enthusiasts she could have predicted as well as a few less obvious entries: a man her age with a flat cap and a cane, a teenage girl who could have been one of the young men’s girlfriends but wasn’t, and a woman in pearls, a feathered fascinator and a salmon-pink two-piece.
“Dressed like she was off to Ascot,” said Ruby.
Bidding for the comics started low, but quickly accelerated. The bids rose to £50,000, then £60,000, then £65,000. Ruby hadn’t set herself a limit - whatever they went for, she’d reasoned, she could afford to pay it - but she was startled by just how much competition there turned out to be. At £70,000, some of the interest fell away - the would-be bidders, she assumed, having reached their own upper limits.
By £80,000, there were just three of them left: Ruby, the man with the cane and the woman in the fascinator. The man dropped out of the race at £85,000, but the woman showed no sign of giving up.
“She kept pushing,” Ruby said. “Higher and higher. £86,000, 87, 88. She wouldn’t give up.”
At £100,000, to Ruby’s surprise, the woman abruptly stopped bidding, and the auctioneer declared Ruby the buyer.
“I think I thought s
he’d reached her limit then, too,” Ruby said. “I craned my neck round her way. Partly to get a look at her, but also so I could say, you know… no hard feelings. Better luck next time. But she just glared at me, like I’d kicked her cat or done my business on her carpet, then flounced right out of the auction room.”
“Sounds like a bitch,” El observed.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Ruby.
She’d paid for the comics upfront, and they arrived at her flat three days later, sealed in transparent polythene.
“I put them in the spare room, in a drawer,” she said. “Probably less fancy than they deserved, for that price, but it was dry and safe, and I knew that way the boys wouldn’t catch sight of them before I’d had the chance to wrap them up.”
They’d stayed there for a week, the polythene gathering dust. Until she’d gone out for dinner in Covent Garden one evening with Michael and his girlfriend, and come home to find them gone.
“The drawer was wide open,” she said. “Empty.”
But nothing else was missing.
“Oh, they’d turned the place over,” she said. “Thrown a few cushions about, pulled some of the ornaments out of the cabinets. But they hadn’t busted the front door or put the windows in. It was a professional job.”
She said this last part with a kind of grudging admiration.
“Why didn’t you call me?” El said. It didn’t even occur to her to ask why Ruby hadn’t called the police. You just didn’t.
(“It’s like them vampires,” Ruby used to say in the early days. “You never invite them in.”
And some of the other things she kept lying around in that spare room would have raised a few questions, too. The Monet on the wall, for one).
“I didn’t want you telling the boys,” she answered. “Last thing I need is them thinking I’m some defenceless old dear who can’t look after herself on her own.”
El saw her point, though she didn’t concede it: Michael, she knew, had been pressuring his mother to pack up the Edgware flat and move south of the river, closer to him in Balham and Dexter in Battersea. She’d been resisting, but he was stubborn, persistent. Of course he was, El thought - he was her son.
The Debt Page 3