The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  There were people in there already, reclining on the sofas and milling around the coffeemaker - Ruby and Sita and Karen, her security guard outfit swapped for blue dungarees and a plain white t-shirt, and two white women she didn’t recognise who sat physically apart from the other three. One looked around El’s age, blonde and fresh-faced, her big blue eyes framed by two thick plaits and large gold hoop earrings; the other was older, El guessed mid-40s, in a navy Chanel suit with an auburn Anna Wintour bob and bright red lipstick, looking as fashionably wealthy as Rose had the first time El had laid eyes on her. If the way she was gnawing at her bottom lip and wringing her expensively-manicured hands together was any indication, El thought, she was also very, very nervous.

  All of them turned to look at El as she and Rose walked in.

  El smiled, tight and awkward, in response, and sat down on the sofa next to Sita, who gave her thigh a silent squeeze in greeting.

  “Shall we do introductions, now everyone’s here?” said Rose, more dinner party host than criminal mastermind.

  “Not on my account, sweetheart,” said Ruby, pouring molten coffee and seven cubes of sugar into a mug. “I know half of this shower already, and what’s that they say? A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met?”

  “I’d quite like to know who it is I’m supposed to be working with, if it’s all the same to you,” said the blonde woman, in a soft Welsh accent that El could imagine getting stronger whenever she was angry, or tired, or drunk.

  For a moment, nobody responded.

  “I’ll start then, shall I?” said Karen, apparently bemused by the set-up. “Karen Baxter. Can’t sing, can’t dance, can act a little if it’s on the job. And I hate all this introducing yourself bollocks, so don’t ask me to talk about my dream holiday or tell you what kind of animal I’d want to come back as, alright? I had enough of that when I did telesales.”

  “You’d be a squirrel, I reckon,” said Ruby, manoeuvring herself onto a high stool next to the kitchen counter. “Cheeky little bugger like you. Robbing nuts off all the other squirrels in the forest to take back to your nest.”

  The blonde woman laughed.

  “Drey,” said Karen. “Where a squirrel lives - it’s called a drey. Not a nest.”

  “See what I mean?” said Ruby to the others. “A cheeky bugger.”

  Karen grinned and blew her a kiss.

  ———

  “She mostly works the short game now, does Karen,” Ruby had told her, back at the Edgware flat after Dexter had left for his meeting. “Pig in a poke, wallet dips, that sort of thing. But she’s a demon with a lockpick. An absolute genius.”

  “You’d expect so, with a father like that,” said Sita. “It’s in the blood.”

  “Who’s her father?” El asked.

  “Leon Baxter,” said Ruby. “Bit before your time, but a hell of a tea-leaf back in his day. Never met a safe he couldn’t pop or a bolted drum he couldn’t squeeze through.”

  “Until he vanished, anyway,” said Sita.

  “He vanished?”

  “Like a puff of smoke,” said Ruby. “When Karen was all of a year old. I got to know her Mum not long after - his missus. Word was he’d stitched up the crew on his last job and done a runner with the takings, but she wasn’t having it. She seemed to think something had, you know... happened to him.”

  “Someone, you mean,” said Sita darkly.

  “Did she say who she thought had done it?” said El.

  “No names, nothing like that,” said Ruby. “But she said he’d told her that the bloke who’d hired him and his mates for that last job was a proper hard bastard. Type who’d shoot you soon as look at you. Scared the shit out of him, she said - and he didn’t frighten easy, Leon Baxter.”

  “What was the job?” El asked. She remembered how badly Rose had wanted Marchant to feel personal for El; wondered whether she was looking for the same personal connection - the same hate, the same sense of needing to settle a score - in all the women she brought in. And whether the hard bastard who’d commissioned Baxter might have been the same one she’d seen coughing up a blackened lung in the video Rose had shown her.

  “Something up north, was all she’d tell me,” Ruby said. “Wouldn’t even say where up north. Could have been Glasgow or Gateshead for all I know. Whatever scared him, she’d caught a bit of it too - that was the impression I got.”

  That’s worth digging into, El thought. When the opportunity presents itself.

  ———

  “Me next, then, is it?” said the blonde woman, when no-one took the baton from Karen.

  “Knock yourself out, love,” said Ruby, raising her mug towards the woman in a cheers! gesture. She tipped the syrupy coffee inside into her mouth and smacked her lips in appreciation.

  “Of course, if someone else’d rather...” said the blonde woman, glowering at Ruby, who drained the last dregs of caffeinated sugar from the bottom of her mug obliviously.

  “This is Kat,” said Rose, stepping into the space between them.

  ———

  “Kat Morgan,” Ruby had said. “She’s an actress. Classically trained - RADA and all that bollocks.”

  “Oh, spare me,” said Sita, who’d harboured theatrical aspirations of her own before surrendering wholesale to the allure of the con. “A drama diploma and a couple of student productions of Miss Julie is hardly the RSC, now is it?”

  “She’s been on Casualty, I heard,” said Ruby, whose entertainment tastes ran more to prime time BBC than the West End.

  “Oh, well, in that case...” said Sita acidly.

  “She’s the straight one?” El asked.

  “Nah,” said Ruby. “The acting doesn’t exactly pay the bills, if you know what I mean. She works a sort of one-woman badger game out of the casinos round Mayfair and Park Lane. Hangs around the roulette wheel in a little black dress until she catches the eye of some pissed-up foreigner with a stack of chips burning a hole in his pocket, gets him hammered, goes back with him to his hotel and then sneaks off with his wallet and his chips once he’s passed out on her.”

  “And the casinos let her back in?” said El. She generally avoided gambling scenarios - there was too much security, too much risk. And too much paranoia: even would-be marks were forever looking over their shoulder, expecting to get fleeced.

  “They love her!” laughed Ruby. “She goes back and spends half the chips at the blackjack table after!”

  ———

  Rose introduced Ruby and Sita - as a double-act, El noticed - then turned to the woman with the Anna Wintour bob, who avoided Rose’s eyes, looking down instead at her own clasped hands.

  “This is Hannah,” she said, when the woman failed to speak on her own initiative.

  The woman - Hannah - raised her head, took in the others, and nodded.

  “Lovely to meet you,” she said, her voice stronger and steadier than El would have anticipated. “It’s a pleasure to be working with you all.”

  ———

  “The journalist,” Ruby had said, “her name’s D’Amboise. Hannah D’Amboise.”

  “Should that ring a bell?” El said.

  “Depends where you’re getting up to speed on your current affairs these days,” said Ruby. “She used to do the Nine O’Clock News.”

  “She was on the Nine O’Clock News,” Sita corrected her. “As a political correspondent, not a presenter. She’s not Moira Stuart.”

  “Okay,” said El, confused. “So what’s she doing mixed up with Rose?”

  “Wouldn’t like to say for sure,” said Ruby. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with Marchant arranging to have her old man done in.”

  “That animal,” spat Sita. “That fucking animal.”

  El, who’d rarely heard Sita swear - in English, or Hindi, or any of the seven other languages El knew she used on a semi-regular basis - was momentarily surprised. And wondered again what Marchant had done, to Sita specifically, to warrant the reaction.


  “What happened?” El asked.

  “I’ve never met the woman,” Ruby said, “so this is second-hand information. But what I heard off Rose is: the husband was working at Marchant Holdings, up at the head office over on Bankside, doing something senior in finance. And one day he finds something he shouldn’t in the ledgers - some serious cooking of the books. He goes home and tells his missus, who tells him he needs to do his duty and alert all the right people, the big boss included. So the next morning, he gets up and marches off to work, telling her he’s all set for a bit of a confrontation with Marchant before he rings the old Bill.”

  “Now, I don’t know if he ever had that confrontation, or if he did how the conversation played out – and I don’t know that anyone else does neither, except Marchant and the money man himself - but what I do know, what everyone and his dog knows, is that by the time his secretary comes in to bring him his mid-morning coffee, the bloke was dead. Hanging from a coat hook on his office door.”

  “The Bill weren’t sure what they were seeing at first, according to Rose. Until some helpful little worker bee at Marchant HQ shows them the discrepancies in the books. Then they add two and two together, get 15, and before you know it, they’ve ruled his death a suicide. Said it was guilt over nicking the money - or worry he was going to get found out.”

  “But Hannah D’Amboise knows otherwise?” said El.

  “Exactly. Rose says she did her best to tell the Bill what her old man told her before he pegged it, but nobody listened. Thought she was just trying to protect his reputation - protect herself from a scandal.”

  “She resigned from the BBC last year,” added Sita. “Apparently she’s been spending all of her time since then putting together a case against Marchant, trying to assemble enough evidence to prove his culpability.”

  “Not sure she’s made much headway, mind,” said Ruby. “He knows how to cover his tracks, that one.”

  So now she’s making her own justice instead, El thought. Like the rest of us.

  “And she’s never done anything like this before?” she asked.

  “Not as far as we know,” said Sita. “Though I’d think that what she lacks in experience, she’s likely to make up for in commitment. Wouldn’t you?”

  ———

  “And this is El,” said Rose finally.

  “The famous inside woman,” said Kat.

  “I don’t know about that,” said El uncomfortably.

  “Karen will also be working the inside,” Rose clarified. “In fact, she’s already secured a position at Marchant Holdings.”

  “Starting Monday,” said Karen with mock-pride. “The catering department won’t know what hit them.”

  “Since when do you cook, girl?” said Ruby. “I never seen you so much as boil an egg.”

  “Oi!” said Karen. “I cook. Not starved yet, have I?”

  “I’ll give you that. But Christ knows what’ll happen if they ever stop making them Pot Noodles.”

  “Karen will be delivering the food, rather than making it,” said Rose. “So she’ll be out and about in the building, not down in the kitchen.”

  “And for this may we be forever thankful,” said Ruby.

  Kat wrinkled her nose, apparently disgruntled.

  “What’ll she be doing, then?” she asked, indicating El. “If we’ve got someone on the inside already, what’s the point of her, exactly?”

  “You know,” said Ruby, pouring more coffee into her mug with the exaggerated slowness of a Bond villain, “I thought you’d never ask...”

  ———

  Two hours later, Ruby and Rose had laid out between them the bare bones of the plan - and specifically of the role El would be playing in it. Kat had relaxed a little by then, laughing and joking with Karen and Ruby over biscuits and hot chocolate while Sita and Rose talked quietly through logistics. Hannah, conversely, barely spoke at all - was perfectly polite, even friendly when one of the women asked her a direct question, but kept otherwise to herself, writing copious - but from where El was sitting, unreadable - notes into a spiral-bound pad with a fountain pen.

  Just after 3.30, the kitchen door opened and a child spilled through it - Rose’s daughter, the same red-headed girl El had seen in the photos at the Highgate house. Though older now, almost a teenager, her ears pierced and school uniform lightly modified to project a nascent aesthetic identity: the tie loosened, the shirt untucked, the black trousers tailored tight at the calf and flared at the ankle.

  She threw her bag down onto the floor and then, seeing the roomful of women for the first time, froze.

  “Who are you?” she said, warily, in the kind of posh-girl London accent that used to grate on El like fingernails down a blackboard when she’d first moved to the city as a kid.

  “Sophie,” said Rose mildly, “that isn’t how you speak to people. Especially not people who are guests in our house.”

  “Sorry,” said Sophie, chastened.

  “I thought you were at Alice’s for dinner tonight?” Rose said, sweeping the documents she and Sita had been poring over on the counter into a pile and under a broadsheet with what struck El as impressive subtlety.

  “She’s going to her Dad’s instead,” said Sophie. Her interest in the strange women who’d invaded her home apparently lost, she wandered past them, opened the fridge-freezer and pulled out a tub of ice cream.

  “Nice of her mother to let me know,” said Rose with a sigh. She sped over to the cutlery drawer Sophie had begun to root around in - El assumed for a spoon to accompany the ice cream - and swiped the tub from her daughter’s hand.

  “That’s for after dinner,” she said, her voice for a moment more Rotherham than Kensington. “Have a bag of crisps if you’re hungry.”

  “But I’m starving!” Sophie whined.

  “It’s a hard life, isn’t it?” said Rose, planting a kiss on Sophie’s forehead, a gesture so tender - so instinctively maternal - that it made something in El’s stomach crack, so sharply she thought it might have been audible to the others. She remembered, again, why she was there; what had induced her to throw in with these women, in this room. Then saw, so vividly that it could have been a memory, her mother’s body, naked and broken on the bed in Marchant’s hotel room.

  She needed air, she thought. Air and tobacco.

  “I’m just going outside,” she said, to anyone who might have been listening.

  Without waiting for a reply, she jogged out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out of the door, letting it close behind her. On the doorstep she lit a cigarette, smoked it down to the butt in a dozen drags, threw it to the ground and immediately lit another.

  The door opened, then closed again behind her.

  “You alright, girl?” said Ruby, suddenly standing next to her. “You ran out of there pretty sharpish.”

  “Fine,” said El, watching the tip of the cigarette flare and cool with her breath.

  “The hell you are,” said Ruby. “Look at me.”

  She took hold of El’s chin with one hand; turned El’s face towards her.

  “Marchant,” El said, and suddenly it was spilling out, all of it, and there was nothing she could do. “He did it. He killed my Mum.”

  “You what?” said Ruby, frowning.

  “It wasn’t George Young,” she said. “That’s what Rose was telling me the other day. It was him, Marchant. He did it.”

  And then the second cigarette was on the ground and she was crying, uncontrollably, for the second time that week, and Ruby was holding her, arms around El’s waist and shoulders and El’s face buried in her neck.

  “It’s alright, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s alright.”

  “I don’t think it is,” said El. “I really don’t.”

  She couldn’t breathe; could barely get the words out.

  “No,” said Ruby, rubbing her back. “No, you’re right. It ain’t. But we’re going to get him, girl. We’re going to get the bastard. And then... maybe it will be, eh? Mayb
e it will be.”

  Chapter 12

  Soho

  1996

  El had never had cause to step inside Chestnut House, Soho’s answer to the private members’s clubs that seemed to line the streets of Mayfair and St James’s, but Kat assured her that she wouldn’t regret visiting, were she ever inclined - that the visual spectacle alone made it worth the effort she’d expend leapfrogging the waiting list and conjuring up the necessary references its membership committee demanded. It was, at least as Kat described it, a fin-de-siècle monstrosity: an uneasy patchwork of velvet drapes, dusty Gothic Revival furniture and dead-eyed taxidermy spanning two subterranean bars and a boutique hotel on the upper floors, its lighting low and its cocktails poured from copper samovars by moustachioed waiters in frocked coats and monocles. Its members were a diverse bunch: CEOs and media magnates, A-list actors and old-money gentry, united by a desire to drink, snort and occasionally - in the privacy of the Chestnut’s mirrored bathroom stalls - inject as much as they wanted, without worrying that they might appear on the front page of the tabloids the following day.

  It was Marchant’s favourite watering hole.

  Kat had been hanging out there for a week, she said, before she saw him. She’d ignored him that first time, though had made a point of walking past his table and directing a smile his way as she walked to the bar for a refill, hiking her dress up her thighs to show them off to their best advantage. He hadn’t returned the smile, or seemed to react at all, but then, she hadn’t expected him to - nothing that Rose had told them had suggested he was a man who enjoyed a sexually assertive woman. All she’d hoped for, at that stage, was to make a very minor impression - the kind he might recall later, when he met her again.