Graveyards, he knew from past experience, were good for body dumps, especially if you could find a fresh grave to piggyback onto. And he didn’t want to be driving round for long with 8-odd stone of dead girl in the back of the motor. So he scoured the map for churches, burial plots - the nearer the better.
He’d settled on one a quarter of a mile west - one that was, he’d thought as he’d pulled up in the side street that ran alongside it, just about exactly what he needed. There were no lampposts there, no street lights; the block was all commercial - full of offices, not pubs or restaurants - and looked as if it was deserted after five, once the white-collar drones had gone home for the night. The odds of anyone seeing him, he’d thought, were pretty slim.
He’d carried the suitcase through the empty street and into the churchyard. It had taken him a minute, in the almost full dark, to make out the figure slumped in the doorway - to see that it was a person, not a pile of rags or a bag of rubbish. He’d been ready to run, to chuck the suitcase back in the boot and find another place to dump it, when an idea had occurred to him.
He’d crept closer to the figure, then closer again, then so close he could see its chest rising and falling as it breathed. It was a bloke, an old pisshead passed out cold on the steps, red-faced and open-mouthed, a sour stink of booze-drenched shit coming off him in waves.
He’d tested the water first - stamped his feet on the ground, loudly, then again on the concrete next to the alkie’s ear. The alkie hadn’t stirred; hadn’t even twitched.
It was perfect.
He’d worked quickly, unlocking the suitcase and pulling the Tom’s body out in one movement, still amazed at how light it was, even with the muscles starting to seize up. He’d carried her over to the doorway and put her down next to the alkie, her face turned away from his and towards the wall.
And then there’d been two of them, sat side by side - two lushes, passed out together after a night on the piss. Enough to deter anyone who might walk past from taking a closer look.
He’d taken the alkie’s hand and pressed it, for good measure, to the Tom’s clothes - her skirt, her top, her knickers. But he’d thought then - and been proved right later - that there was no need. Chances are, the alkie would have a feel for himself as soon as he came to in the morning.
———
“And you know the best part?” Lomax said, smiling to himself. “He went down for it! The alkie went down for it! I thought it would just muddy the water, throw the filth off the scent. But the alkie went down for it! Young, his name was. Sad bastard.”
The video paused again, and Lomax stopped mid-sentence, his wide face filling the screen.
“You filmed this?” asked El.
“Yes,” said Rose. “At his house in Wandsworth, earlier this year.”
El stopped to think, a hundred questions jostling for primacy.
“Why?” she said.
“Why did I film it, or why did he let me?”
“Both. Either. Why would he tell you this? And why did you want to know in the first place? What’s your interest in what happened to my mother?”
Rose raised a hand, stopping her before she could ask more.
“Let me start with the easy one,” she said. “He spoke to me, and allowed me to film him, because I paid him a very large sum of money. It wasn’t to clear his conscience - as you probably saw, he doesn’t have one. I gave him £750,000, in two installments - the first half to secure his time and convince him I was serious, and the second when I was satisfied that he’d told me everything he usefully could about his time with Marchant.”
“But he was dying.”
“Yes. But like a lot of monsters, he’s a sentimentalist about the things he’s chosen to love. He has children, three of them, and pitifully little to pass on to them in savings. Apparently his need to bequeath them a legacy outweighed any deathbed loyalty he felt to his old employer.”
“Why?” said El again. “Why my mother?”
Rose stared at the frozen screen, impassive.
“What you just saw,” she said, “is a 20 minute excerpt taken from nearly 18 hours of footage. It’s the part most relevant to you, but what happened to your mother... it wasn’t unique, from Lomax’s perspective. He was with Marchant for 30 years - there were a lot of messes to clean up. There are a lot of stories like hers on this video.”
El felt a prickle in the corner of her eyes, a line of something wet trickle down her nose, and realised she was crying, involuntarily, for the first time in years. She dabbed at her face with the sleeve of Claire Brandon’s jacket; swallowed.
“My investigators had been looking into him for a few years now,” Rose continued, anticipating El’s next question. “Along with a few other of Marchant’s key associates. They’d pieced together enough to have at least some sense of the things that Lomax might have been involved with, all the way back to the ‘60s. None of it was certain, by any means. But it gave me a place to start when I interviewed him.”
“There were others?” said El. “Other women like my mother?”
Rose nodded.
“Before her, and after,” she said soberly.
“And these other women - they’re why you’re after Marchant?”
“Yes.”
She still wouldn’t offer more on her own motivations, El thought; not now, not yet.
“If you know all this,” she said instead, “why haven’t you taken it to the police? We’re talking about murder.”
The police wouldn’t have been El’s first port of call, of course. Not even for this. But Rose was respectable, influential. If she spoke up, El thought, someone in a position of authority could be persuaded to act.
“I don’t think you fully understand the extent of Marchant’s reach,” said Rose.
El wasn’t buying this.
“Whoever he is,” she said, “he doesn’t have the whole Met in his pocket. You’d find someone to listen, if you looked.”
She was hiding something, El thought. It was there in the downward cast of her eyes, the light flush of blood in her cheeks.
“Perhaps,” Rose said cagily, “I’d rather not have the police ask too many questions about the provenance of the information. Or about me. You know how that feels, surely?”
El wondered, again, what kind of skeletons Rose might have lurking in her closet - and under what circumstances she might have found herself moving in the same circles as women like Ruby and Sita.
“And what if I want him to go down for it?” said El, testing her. “She was my mother.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. You’ve just... thrown all of this at me. I don’t know what I think yet.”
The early shape of what she wanted, she thought, was something like justice. Not the kind the police delivered, not the kind that everyone told her had been served when George Young was led, snivelling and whimpering, down from the dock at his sentencing. And not the eye-for-an-eye, Old Testament kind that the tabloids crowed about when Young was stabbed to death with a sharpened toothbrush by his schizophrenic cell mate three years later, though the feeling she’d had then was closest to the one growing in her now.
Below the nausea that had spread from her chest to her stomach at the mention of her mother, below the septic wave of renewed grief that had flooded over her at Lomax’s confession, she was beginning to think that what she wanted was a kind of justice that looked more like retribution than the administration of law. Something dark and hateful – the extraction of a blood debt, reparations for the loss of her childhood paid in pain, in distress. She wanted Marchant to suffer the way Lomax had suffered, and worse.
She remembered what Rose had said, about wanting the hit on him to be personal, and realised that she wanted that, too. She didn’t just want him to hurt - she wanted to be the one to hurt him.
“It wouldn’t stick,” Rose admitted. “I’ve spoken to my investigators already about the possibility. And a solicitor friend, off the record. Even
if we were able to persuade someone to bring charges against Marchant, a halfway competent brief could have them dismissed in a heartbeat. There’s no evidence there that isn’t circumstantial. Most of the cases they pertain to have been closed for years, like your mother’s. And a confession from a dying man, a confession that the most cursory probing would show that I paid for... well, you can see how it would look.”
El saw her point. Even in the absence of the money and power and influence a man like Marchant was bound to wield, it was a non-starter - however persuasive Lomax’s testimony had seemed.
“How sure are you that Marchant really is guilty?” she said. “How do you know Lomax didn’t just take the money and tell you what you wanted to hear?”
She had to ask - it was due diligence. But she’d known as soon as she’d heard Lomax talking that he’d done what he said he’d done, and done it with the same detached professionalism he’d applied to the other “problems” Rose said he’d solved for Marchant. She’d known men like Lomax before, and they didn’t lie. They rarely needed to, when brute force and a sociopathic disregard for moral convention could get them where they needed to go.
“I’m absolutely certain,” said Rose, and El believed her.
“And Ruby,” said El, voicing another of the questions worrying away at her. “She told you about my mother, before she set me up with you and that painting?”
“In a way,” said Rose. “She’d mentioned you before, as someone I ought to meet - someone who was very good at what she did, someone I might find interesting. And as one of her girls - someone she’d trained up as a child.”
It was probably irrational, she thought, but the idea of Ruby talking to other people about her, even in the vaguest terms, made her uneasy. It wasn’t a betrayal - she knew Ruby too, and she knew exactly what she might have said, and the benign way she’d likely have said it. And even if Ruby had never mentioned Rose to her before last month, the fact that she knew her at all - and apparently had known her for quite a while - made El think that Rose was, probably, someone worth trusting. Ruby was pretty discerning when it came to the people she let in.
But still, it made her feel unsettled. More exposed than she’d like.
“You what, then?” she said, more accusingly than she’d intended. “Got your investigators to look into me, too? Just on the off-chance I might have some sort of secret buried?”
“Absolutely not,” said Rose adamantly. “Why would I? But Ruby had used your name when she’d talked about you, you see. Your full name. And you must agree, it’s unusual. Distinctive. So when my team followed up on what Lomax had said, when they tracked down your mother’s case and your name cropped up… well, I put two and two together.”
“So you’re saying it’s a coincidence? Ruby tells you about an inside woman you just have to meet, and the same woman turns out to be connected to exactly the bloke you’re planning to do over?”
“Of course not. When I saw your name in the reports, I rang her immediately to ask if she’d… broker an introduction. I wanted to make sure you were as good as she’d said, just to be absolutely certain that you’d be able to do the job - hence Sita’s bit of embellishment, and the business with the Haring. But I knew the moment I heard who you were and what Marchant had done to you that you were the person I needed. And that if I could just show you a little of what I know about him, you’d agree. He needs to be dealt with. Surely you think so too, after what you just heard?”
“I don’t know,” said El. “I honestly don’t. I don’t even know what it is you’re planning. What it is you want to do to him.”
“Let me tell you, then,” said Rose, urgently. “Let me tell you, and you can make up your mind.”
El hesitated. Thought about all the other questions she had that needed answers, still.
“Alright,” she said. “Tell me.”
Chapter 10
Edgware
1996
Ruby’s flat had barely changed in 20 years. There were fewer plates on the sideboard since Dexter and Michael had moved out; fewer boxes of cereal out on the dinner table and piles of laundered boxer shorts stacked up neatly on top of the ironing board. But it felt the same, El thought. Just as welcoming and homely now as it ever had when she was a kid.
It could have been the furnishings. Though the sofas had been upgraded half a dozen times over the last two decades - a set of Harvest Gold loveseats traded in for a bright red three-piece suite, an avocado Chesterfield for the burnt orange sectional that currently dominated the living room - they still privileged comfort above aesthetics. The windows were still high and wide, flooding every room and corridor with outdoor light. Photographs still dominated almost every conceivable shelf and wall-space: the boys, blowing out the candles of birthday cakes and clutching diplomas, mortarboards secured to their heads, at their university and law school graduation ceremonies; Winston, Ruby’s beloved husband, dead since 1988 but immortalised in posed family portraits and more naturalistic shots at home, down the pub and at the allotment; Sita, and El, and a few other of Ruby’s protégés besides, hugging and chinking glasses and smiling for the camera. Though there were none, El noted, of Rose - however well the two of them might know each other.
There were a handful of paintings, too, scattered haphazardly across the walls among the photographs: a Degas ballerina, a Toulouse-Lautrec can-can, a Seurat landscape, a villa by Cézanne. They could easily have been prints - replicas bought for five quid a go at Spitalfields Market or a little stall off Camden Lock. Except El knew they weren’t; knew, at least in the case of the Degas and the Seurat, exactly where they’d come from.
Ruby herself sat, high and regal, on a padded yellow wingback, a cushion tucked behind her, another underneath her, and her feet supported by a fluffy gold footstool, warming her hands on a steaming cup of something hot and non-specifically herbal that made El want to gag, even from 6 feet away.
“She weren’t lying,” she began, in response to El’s questions. “We go back a long way, me and Rose. I’ve known her since she was... well, about the same age you were when I first met you.”
“Younger,” Sita interjected from an equally stuffed armchair equidistant from Ruby’s and the velour bean bag on which El was reluctantly perched. “She was 10, if you remember?”
Was she like me? El wondered. Another little Artful Dodger drawn into the fold?
“Do you know, you’re right,” said Ruby, thoughtfully.
“It’s been a long time,” said Sita, with what seemed to El a trace of sadness.
“30 years,” agreed Ruby.
There was a drawn-out silence, the two older women swapping coded looks over their teacups. There’s another conversation going on here, El thought; one she definitely wasn’t party to.
“And you never thought to tell me about her before?” she said, deliberately breaking the silence.
“She’s a very private person,” said Ruby. “Likes to keep herself to herself.”
So do I, El thought. But you still told her about me, didn’t you?
“I’m sure that Auntie Ruby only mentioned you in passing,” said Sita, sensing the ticking of El’s displeasure and aiming to defuse it before it could detonate. “Perhaps she thought the two of you might hit it off.”
There was another rapid-fire exchange of unreadable glances across the room; another round of lip-pursing, eyebrow-furrowing and quizzical head-tilting. They may as well be winking at each other, El thought.
“I need to know,” she said, trying to keep a lid on her anger and the sense of betrayal that accompanied it. “Was the video your idea? Because it was a bloody low blow, if it was. You could have just told me what you knew, instead of letting me find out like that.”
“What video?” said Ruby, seeming genuinely puzzled.
“You know what video,” said El. “Don’t try to put one over on me now, alright? I know you know what I’m talking about.”
“And I’m telling you, I don’t know what you
’re on about,” said Ruby. “What video?”
“I’m afraid you have us at a disadvantage, darling,” said Sita carefully. “I haven’t a clue what this video is, and I’m not sure that Auntie Ruby does, either.”
They’re professional liars, El thought. Faking sincerity is what they do - what we do.
But they had their own set of ethics, didn’t they? Their own rules that they played by, labyrinthine and endlessly malleable though those rules could be. And they looked after her, always had. The idea that they’d set her up to be hurt like that - it wasn’t like them. Wasn’t commensurate with anything they’d ever done, at least as far as she was concerned.
“Cross my heart, sweetheart,” said Ruby, softening her tone, “I’ve not had nothing to do with any video. Showed you something, did she? Something you didn’t like?”
She really doesn’t know, El decided. Neither of them do.
She felt a flash of relief, so sharp she could taste it. They hadn’t been in on it; hadn’t known, and kept it from her.
And if they didn’t know, then those clandestine looks weren’t about guilt or pity. It wasn’t them feeling bad for her - or any worse than they’d felt before.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Not important.”
Ruby squinted at her, a mix of curiosity and concern playing out across her face - then glanced back down at the herbal concoction in her hands, apparently willing to let the issue slide for now, if El was.
“So what did you make,” asked Sita, “of Rose’s proposition?”
“The con the two of you had me audition for, you mean?” said El.
“Oh, come now, darling,” said Sita. “You can’t begrudge us our little fun, surely? You know there was no malice intended. We only wanted to... show her what you could do. We couldn’t expect her to take our word for it that you were so prodigiously talented. She had to see you in action for herself.”
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