The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  So she thought instead about Alison Miller, and how she’d react to a man like Marchant, allowing the persona to harden over her like a protective carapace, and Miller’s thoughts and feelings - a mix of curiosity and irritation at being contacted out of the blue by a high-profile stranger - to subsume her own. Slowly, she let herself fade as the edges of Miller sharpened, until there was barely a her at all.

  And then she was ready.

  He arrived exactly at the time they’d agreed - imagining, she thought, that she’d be late, and that he’d get the drop on her. He looked disheartened, even a little aggrieved when he saw her already in the booth, clocking the cherry-red attaché case by her feet that she’d told him - when he’d asked how to recognise her - that she’d have with her. Though he hid it well - quickly rearranging his features into a warm, genuine smile as he caught her eye.

  Objectively, she thought, he was an attractive man, even in his 60s - trim and broad-shouldered, his grey hair thick, his teeth white and his cheekbones defined.

  “You beat me to it,” he said genially, his long legs bowing as he sat down to face her.

  Alison Miller, she thought, would be annoyed by the familiarity, the obvious effort to charm her. She’d have no patience for it.

  “I’m here solely,” she said, “because you told me you had, and I quote, information I might find useful. So if we could cut to the chase, I’d appreciate it. I really don’t care for the cloak and dagger approach.”

  “It’s like that, is it?” said Marchant, smile still firmly in place.

  “What information is it that you have for me, Mr Marchant?”

  The smile widened, becoming predatory.

  “It’s about your client,” he said. “The Honourable Member for Silvertown.”

  “What about him?”

  “I know about him. About his... predilections. The whores.”

  Miller would bluff, she thought; would give nothing away, even when confronted with facts she knew to be true.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Now, we both know that’s a lie, don’t we? Us and half of Fleet Street, by all accounts.”

  “I don’t know where you’re getting this information, but you’re mistaken. Mr Henderson doesn’t have so much as a kiss and tell story to his name.”

  “Because you’ve quashed them all. Very efficiently, I might add.”

  She picked up the attaché case and retrieved her jacket from the back of the booth, preparing to leave.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said, sliding an arm into the jacket.

  She’d planned to make her exit then; to play hard to get, and force him to do a little more chasing before she capitulated to whatever he offered. Before she’d even made it to her feet, though, the plan was thrown into chaos.

  Bernard Croft - reluctant theatre-goer, Group Chief Executive of the second largest bank in Europe and father of the academically-challenged Jonathan - was standing over their table, an expression of nervous desperation writ large across his pink, porcine face.

  “Alison,” he said restlessly. “I’m so glad - I was told I might be able to find you here. Do you have a spare minute?”

  Bloody Ruby, she thought, drawn momentarily back to herself. It must have been her. Always stirring the pot. Though how she’d even managed to get in touch with Croft...

  She took a breath; steeled herself. There was nothing to do but brazen it out.

  “Mr Croft,” she said, in the clipped schoolmarmish tone that had cowed him so effectively last time, “I’m with someone. This is quite spectacularly inappropriate.”

  “I know, and I’m so sorry,” said Croft, seeming genuinely apologetic. “But you weren’t answering my calls, and we’ve got so little time before, you know... the big day.”

  Jonathan’s A levels, she thought. His mock exam results must have been worse even than the school had anticipated.

  “Now,” she said, casting a deliberate glance across the table at Marchant, “is not the time.”

  Marchant, she noticed, had been watching the dialogue play out between them with an expression of absorbed, faintly amused interest - a silent spectator at a tennis match unexpectedly invaded by a streaker.

  “But...” Croft began.

  “I’ll call you,” she said, interrupting him. “Later today.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes. Now, if you don’t mind...”

  Croft seemed to notice Marchant’s presence for the first time - evidently recognising him, and immediately recoiling in embarrassment as he realised who else had been party to the conversation.

  “Yes,” he stammered. “Yes. I’ll... be going. And you’ll... be in touch?”

  “This afternoon,” she said - the statement somewhere between a promise and a dismissal.

  “Good,” he said, scrabbling to retrieve the shreds of his dignity. “Good. I’ll... expect your call, then, shall I?”

  “Goodbye, Mr Croft.”

  Croft looked as if he was about to say more, then thought better off it, nodded, and scuttled, crab-like, away to the door and out of the pub.

  “Bernard Croft is one of your clients?” said Marchant, impressed.

  Ruby had judged it right, then. A little extra convincer wasn’t such a bad move, after all.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said, buttoning the jacket.

  “Before you’ve heard my offer?”

  “What offer? You have nothing I want.”

  “I want you to dump Henderson and whoever else you’re working with and come and work with me instead. Exclusively.”

  She laughed, a derogatory chuckle that caused his lips to tighten and his eyebrows to lower in tightly-controlled anger.

  Not many women talk to you like that, do they? she thought. And we can probably guess what happens to the few that do.

  “That isn’t an offer, Mr Marchant,” she said. “It’s a request. And I’m inclined to pass.”

  “How about this, then?” he said. “Come and work with me, and I’ll double what Henderson is paying you.”

  “No.”

  “Triple it, then.”

  “Do you think we’re negotiating? My answer is no.”

  She stood up, attaché case in hand.

  “Henderson’s on borrowed time,” he said quietly. “You’re a clever woman, you must know that. You can lean on every journalist from here to Aberdeen, but eventually the rumours will get enough of a head of steam that you won’t be able to stop them spilling out. He’s careless, isn’t he? With the working girls. And careless men tend to ruin themselves in the end, no matter how capably they’re handled from the outside.”

  “Is that a threat?” she said.

  “No, it’s a statement of fact. But surely a very good incentive to investigate new opportunities. Especially the lucrative ones that go out of their way to seek you out.”

  She stared at him, Alison Miller’s artificially green eyes meeting his pale blue ones, and, without breaking the gaze, lowered herself back down into the booth.

  “Ten thousand a week,” she said.

  “Done.”

  “I wonder if you entirely understand what it is that you’re buying. Corporate crisis management isn’t my area.”

  “I know. I’m very aware of where your expertise lies.”

  “And you don’t think you might be better served by a more conventional PR firm?”

  “Hardly. Not for what I have in mind.”

  “Which is what?”

  He placed his own briefcase up and onto the table; cracked it open, and pulled a sheaf of paper and a black pen from its depths.

  “Sign this,” he said, pushing the pen her away across the scratched wood, “and I’ll explain.”

  It was a non-disclosure agreement rather than a contract - six pages long and held together in the top-left corner with a paper clip.

  She made a point of reading it intently - taking her time, lingering over every clause and res
triction. It was watertight but generic; she imagined his solicitor drawing up a dozen of them a week. If anything, it was less constraining than she’d imagined.

  But then, perhaps lawyers weren’t his first - or his preferred - port of call, when he needed to enforce an obligation or remind his associates of the necessity of keeping their mouths shut.

  The thought would have chilled her, in other circumstances. But Alison Miller was tough. She’d dealt with harder bastards than Marchant before, and she would do again.

  “This all looks very standard,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment.

  She took the pen, and signed with Miller’s signature - a series of looping, unintelligible peaks and troughs in which an A and an M could be discerned, if you squinted.

  “Now talk,” she said. “Tell me what I’d be getting myself into.”

  He tucked the signed NDA away into his briefcase.

  “I want to stand as an MP,” he said. “An independent. And I want you to run my campaign.”

  She nodded, as if she’d been expecting this. Which she had - albeit not quite in the way that Alison Miller would have been.

  “It’ll be harder without party backing,” she said. “A lot harder. Especially in the absence of any relevant experience.”

  “I’m aware of that. It’s why I need you running the show.”

  “And you realise there’s a limit on campaign spending? You can’t just buy your way in.”

  “Yes. And fortunately I’d rather play things smart than simply throw money around left, right and centre.”

  She nodded again, approvingly.

  “Do you have a particular seat in mind?” she said. “I’m assuming next year’s general is the election you have your eye on.”

  “I do,” he said. “Which is another reason I thought you might be the best woman for the job here. The one I have in mind is Silvertown. Seymour Henderson’s seat.”

  Inside, El smiled. Rose really did know what she was doing.

  ———

  He wasn’t a patient person, Marchant told her. Waiting wasn’t his style. He was much more inclined to make things happen, as and when it suited him.

  Biding his time until a general election that was a year away just wasn’t an option.

  What he wanted - what Rose had known he’d want - was an election he could fight on his own terms. One he knew was coming; one he’d prepared for in advance.

  He wanted a by-election, and soon. And since he couldn’t know for sure which if any of the dozens of sitting MPs in the Greater London area were likely to die on the job in the coming months, leaving an empty seat for him to contest, his best bet was a resignation - a seat vacated by someone forced out of office by a personal crisis, or a scandal; a criminal investigation, or a public humiliation. Someone whose position had been made untenable.

  And Seymour Henderson, as he saw it, was the man for the job.

  Chapter 14

  Holland Park

  1994

  Lines. Two blue lines, intersecting - a little Nordic cross against a grey plastic background.

  Pregnant.

  Hannah blinked; loosened her grip on the test and shook it, up and down and side to side, then looked again.

  Pregnant.

  The utter improbability of it was startling, almost ridiculous - a whoopee cushion of a revelation, releasing an unexpected raspberry into the quiet stillness of the life she’d built. The life they’d built.

  She was 42 years old. 42 years old. Solidly middle-aged; fast approaching the point at which menopause, not periods or pregnancy, would prove the bane of her gynaecological life.

  (Except, said a small voice in her head, didn’t you read somewhere about there being a surge in fertility just before you hit menopause? Some sort of last hurrah of your ovaries, before they go gentle into that long good night?)

  They’d wanted children - had started trying a year into their marriage 10 years earlier, when he’d still had hair on his head and before she’d begun to find, in a terrible inverse of his baldness, a dozen or so coarse white hairs of her own sprouting up in arbitrary patterns on her chin and neck.

  Children, though, hadn’t happened for them, and eventually - when their sex life had become another household chore dictated by the rhythms of her ovulation cycle, and they’d both submitted to so many blood tests at so many clinics that the tops of their arms were permanently bruised from the needles - they’d agreed to stop trying.

  “At least we’ll get to have a lie-in in the mornings, eh?” he’d said gently, wrapping his arms around her as she cried into his chest. “You know what you’re like, when you don’t get 8 hours.”

  And she’d laughed, and let him hold her, and then cried again - for the stretch marks that wouldn’t settle on her stomach, the cot she’d never keep beside the bed, the home-office that would never be a nursery.

  Pregnant.

  They’d settled, after that. They’d taken holidays - three a year, at least. Koh Samui. Tasting tours in Napa Valley. Diving in the Maldives. They’d learned to salsa and swing-dance. Eventually they’d acquired a rescue dog - a Norfolk terrier named Horatio who was watching her now from the carpet as she paced the bedroom, waving the testing stick maniacally back and forth.

  She needed to tell Justin. But when? Should she ring him at work - ask (no, tell) his secretary to pull him out of whatever meeting he was in and call his wife, right now? Should she go to his office in person - greet him in the lobby with a smile and a jewellery box, the positive test tucked away inside like an oversized engagement ring?

  Or was it better to wait until later, when he’d finished for the day - to set out candles, dim the lights, press a glass of champagne into his hand as he walked through the door?

  No; not champagne. Apple juice. Mineral water. Something non-alcoholic.

  She flashed back to the night before, to the two glasses of red she’d had with dinner and the half a joint she’d smoked to wind down before bed, and tried not to feel guilty.

  Deciding against an impromptu visit to Marchant Holdings, she spent the afternoon in a frenzy of cleaning and polishing, wiping down surfaces and stacking the dishwasher with the fervour of a ‘50s sitcom housewife. Just after 4 o’clock, as she was ransacking the kitchen drawers in pursuit of candles, she heard a key turn in the lock; heard the front door opening.

  It couldn’t be Justin, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the office before 6.

  Unless... unless he knew, somehow? Unless he’d sensed something, felt in his bones that she had something to tell him, something significant - something that required him to be here, now?

  Was that possible?

  She ran towards the door, almost tripping over her own bare feet in her haste to get to him. But when she saw him, she stopped abruptly in her tracks.

  He was pale, blanched, the pink blush that usually dusted his cheeks faded to sickly yellow. His shirt collar was loose, his tie missing. And he smelled - smelled bad, like old sweat and stale tobacco, and nothing at all like the notes of soap and bergamot that had clung to him when he’d left the house that morning.

  “Have you been smoking?” she asked. He’d quit years ago, when he was still in his 30s. She couldn’t imagine him smoking these days; couldn’t reconcile a burning cigarette end with the fastidious, immaculately-upholstered man who shared her life, the one who took vitamins and watched his weight and jogged four times a week around Kyoto Garden.

  “I found something,” he said, ignoring her question, staring over her shoulder into the middle distance. His voice was weak, faltering; not a voice she recognised as his.

  “Justin?” she said, reaching out for him. “Sweetheart?”

  His head snapped around to face hers. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated to twice their normal size.

  Had he taken something?

  “I found something,” he said again. “At work. And I don’t... Hannah, I don’t think it’s something they want me to kn
ow.”

  ———

  “I lost the baby,” Hannah told El, pouring a second shot of Scotch into first her tumbler, then El’s. “After Justin... three days after they found him in his office. The doctor said the two things weren’t connected, necessarily. That there were a few possible factors - my age, for one. But you know your own body, don’t know? You know how it feels. And I could feel it happening, after he died. Feel it... stopping, I suppose you’d call it. All those non-essential functions just shutting down, until I wasn’t the right environment for a baby anymore. Wasn’t, you know… a viable host.”

  It was the first real conversation they’d had; the first time El had heard her speak more than a handful of sentences at a time.

  “I’m sorry,” El said. And she was: though she’d never wanted kids herself, she’d seen enough other women her age and older try for them, and fail, to have some second-hand understanding of the drawn-out pain of it, the never-ending wrench in the gut.

  “I’m aware that it happens,” Hannah said, pushing the second tumbler in El’s direction across Rose’s vast dining room table and taking a quick, dainty sip from her own. “I’ve seen the statistics. But I can’t say that they help much.”

  “No,” said El, looking down at her own drink.

  “I named him, afterwards. The baby. It makes no sense, I know - at that stage there’s barely anything to name, just cells, clusters of cells. But it didn’t seem right not to call him something.”

  “What did you call him?” El asked, tentatively.

  “Joshua.”

  “That’s a good name,” said El, feeling a little out of her depth. “Solid.”

  “It’s what we’d always said we’d call him, if we had a boy - and Justin always wanted a boy, I could tell. It’s after Joshua Tree - the park, you know, in California? We went there one year, just after we were married. A beautiful place.”

  She shook herself, sleek head and narrow shoulders, as if shrugging off the memory, and rubbed at her tired-looking eyes with one knuckle. They were dry, El saw.