“Epsilon,” he said, smirking the way he always did when he had cause to use her real name, knowing it annoyed her, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
They settled up and drove together over Southwark Bridge to Hastings House, Marchant Holdings’s UK base - a 20-storey glass-box off Bankside modelled after the interwar skyscrapers of Chicago and Manhattan. Marchant’s office was, as El had expected, on the top floor, its gargantuan back window treating him and any guests he might entertain to a view of the river, of Victoria Tower and the Palace of Westminster.
Marchant himself was installed behind his desk as one of his assistants led El and Dexter inside - neither rising nor greeting them as they landed.
The other person in the room, a fat man in his forties stuffed like a factory-packed sausage into a pinstripe shirt a size too small for his body, was more effusive.
“Redfearn!” he barked cheerfully, leaping up from his seat to seize Dexter’s arm by the elbow and lock him into an enthusiastic handshake. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here! Old Hannity let you out for the day, did he?”
“Old Hannity,” El thought, was almost certainly George Hannity - one of the senior partners at Fine & Porter, and Michael’s direct superior.
He thinks Dex is Michael, she realised.
Dexter, returning the handshake with the same broad grin he’d given her the day they’d met in Ruby’s living room, had evidently reached the same conclusion.
“Lovely to see you again,” he told the man, straightening his spine and subtly readjusting his voice until both his posture and his speech were near-perfect replicas of Michael’s. “Are you well?”
“Oh, you know,” said the fat man. “Busy, busy.”
“This is my brief,” said Marchant, interrupting him.
The fat man, remembering himself and where he was, slumped a little, and let go of Dexter’s hand.
“Roderick Creighton,” he told El, sounding chastened. “Representing Mr Marchant.”
“Can we get started?” El said, addressing Marchant over Creighton’s shoulder.
“Let’s,” said Marchant.
El lowered herself into the chair opposite Marchant’s - the chair that had previously been Creighton’s - and crossed Alison Miller’s legs, leaving the two lawyers to hover, impotently, by the side of the desk.
“We’ve prepared a draft of the necessary agreement,” said Dexter stiffly, still in character. “Rod, would you care to take a look?”
Creighton took a pair of half-moon reading glasses - the kind El had only ever heard described as spectacles - from the pocket of his trousers, and placed them, gently, onto the tip of his nose.
“Hand it over, old chap,” he said, “and we’ll see what’s what, eh?”
Dexter removed the stapled contract from the document folio tucked under his arm and lay it out on the edge of the desk, forcing Creighton to hitch up his trousers and bend over, with obvious effort, to examine its contents.
“I assume,” said El to Marchant, as Creighton read, “that you intend for us to start work this afternoon, all being well with the paperwork?”
“That’s the plan,” said Marchant, with a thin smile. “In the meantime - coffee?”
“Love one,” said El.
Marchant picked up the phone on his desk and murmured an order into the receiver. Barely a minute later, the assistant who had shown them inside returned with a tray bearing a polished-silver milk jug, a cafetière and two coffee cups.
No drinks for the hired help, El noticed.
The assistant poured the coffee into the cups and promptly vanished again, leaving El and Marchant to sip in silence as Creighton read and Dexter remained, military-straight, by El’s side.
“It all seems to be in order,” said Creighton after several minutes had elapsed. “No obvious issues, that I can see. If you’re sure you’re happy with the fee?” he added, casting a nervous look at Marchant.
“Do you think I’d have bothered to make the offer if I weren’t?” Marchant snapped.
Creighton wilted in embarrassment.
(“If he’d been a dog, in that moment,” Dexter said later, “that dog would have been an incontinent puppy. The one you take back to the rescue centre when it shits in your shoes”).
“Does that mean we can get on and sign the thing?” said El impatiently.
“Ready when you are,” said Marchant.
At Creighton’s direction, they applied the relevant signatures - the assistant returning, briefly, to act as witness.
“I’ll have the copies faxed across to you by end of day,” Dexter told Creighton, sweeping the papers back into his folio.
“Marvellous, marvellous,” said Creighton - though he sounded, El thought, more subdued than he had previously, ashamed at having been emasculated in the presence of a well-connected colleague.
“Shall we?” El asked Marchant. “We have a lot to do, and I’m conscious of time.”
“We certainly do,” he said. “Bianca will see you out,” he added to the lawyers, not bothering to look at them as he dismissed them.
Her eyes fixed on Marchant’s, she couldn’t see his face as the two of them turned and exited the office, but El imagined Creighton must have looked forlorn, because she heard what sounded like a consolatory hand clamping down on a meaty shoulder, and Dexter - still wearing a facsimile of Michael’s voice - saying, “Drink, old man? You look like you could do with one…”
So very like his Mum, El thought. Always stirring the pot.
“Thank God for that,” said Marchant as the door closed and the sound of the lawyers’s conversation faded. “Can’t stand that man. Useless pompous twat.”
“I’m afraid they’re all like that,” El said. “Even mine.”
“‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Marchant said, emphasising the kill with a relish that made El shudder and choke and scream even as Alison Miller smiled back in agreement.
Can you take care of it? he’d asked Lomax, that day in the hotel. Like her mother’s body was a dining cart; a stack of old room service dishes he’d left to moulder.
She let her eyelids flutter closed, just for a second; pushed the reaction down, into her chest and gut until it was buried under the heat and pressure of Alison Miller’s personality, her cut-throat professionalism.
He was watching her, expectantly.
“I should tell you,” she said, her voice - Alison Miller’s voice - as smooth and unruffled as it might have been had she just paused to contemplate the size of the cheque Marchant was about to write her, “that I don’t take notes, and I don’t keep records of my assignments. Anything we discuss, and anything we implement as a result of that discussion, will be keep exclusively in here.”
She tapped, once, lightly, at the side of her head.
“Very wise,” he agreed.
“I expect you to honour this approach, and to reciprocate in kind,” she continued. “That means nothing typed or written, of course. No notepads or letters or documents. No email, if you use it. But it also means no sound recordings. No Dictaphones.”
“Sounds like a very good idea.”
“So you’re happy to acquiesce?”
“More than happy. It’s hardly in my interest to demand a paper trail, is it?”
“Good. Then I think the most sensible thing in the first instance is for me to outline the approach I have in mind for our campaign. Your campaign, I should say.”
“And I’d love to hear it. Except…”
“Except?”
“Please don’t think I’m questioning your methods, Alison. I already have the utmost faith in any strategy you propose. But ought we not to deal with the initial obstacle first? The fly in the ointment?”
“Henderson, you mean?”
“Yes, Henderson. We can’t very well have me contesting his seat while he’s sitting in Parliament, can we?”
He waited - expecting her to back-track, to offer something new - and she let another smile
bloom and spread across Alison Miller’s borrowed face.
“We certainly can’t,” she said. “Fortunately, I have good news in that regard.”
“You do?”
“I do. This isn’t my first spin on the merry-go-round, Mr Marchant. And Seymour Henderson is being dealt with even as speak.”
Chapter 16
Notting Hill
1996 - The Night Before
Collateral damage, El thought. You don’t want it; you try to avoid creating it, where you can. But sometimes it’s unavoidable.
Sorry, Seymour, she told the man on the screen, silently. It’s nothing personal.
She and Rose were in the basement of the Ledbury Road house, in what El thought might once have been the family TV room. There was a roll-down projector on the far wall, facing a cluster of mismatched comfy chairs that looked, to El, a lot less expensive - and a lot more worn - than Rose’s other furniture. Between two of the chairs was a rickety side-table, the green paint peeling from its stumpy legs; she imagined microwaved popcorn spilling out onto it from plastic bowls on cold Saturday nights, Rose and Sophie reaching for handful after handful as they worked their way through Aladdin, The Lion King, the entire Disney back-catalogue.
This evening, though, the screen showed not Scrooge McDuck or singing warthogs, but a black and white video feed of a naked man - Seymour Henderson, the Honourable Member for Silvertown - spreadeagled on a four-poster bed, his wrists secured to the upper posts by wide leather bondage cuffs, a padlocked chastity cage clamping his penis tight against his swollen scrotum. The lens that captured his predicament was angled in front of and above the bed, giving them a bird’s-eye view of his body. The camerawork was raw and imprecise, cinema vérité shaky.
A pair of arms - slim and hairless, probably female - dangled intermittently into close-up view from the left and right sides of the shot. The camera itself, this suggested, was positioned somewhere between the arms - somewhere on the person of whoever the arms belonged to.
(“And it’ll stay on there the whole time, will it?” Ruby had asked earlier, as El helped secure the tiny, button-like spy-cam to one of the breast-cups of Karen’s latex corset.
“Yes, it’ll stay on,” Karen had replied, exasperated. “It’s held in place, look. And he’ll hardly be able to pull it off himself, will he?”
“Don’t look very steady to me, that’s all.”
“Think you can do better, do you? Fancy trying it on with Henderson yourself?”
“If I were 10 years younger, I’d have a go.”
“10 years?” Karen had snorted, the ripple of her amusement causing El’s hand to lose its grip and the button-cam to slip down into the cleavage of the corset. “That’s optimistic. Just hope I have your confidence, when I get to your age”).
An inaudible instruction was issued off-screen, and Henderson wriggled his wrists in their restraints, trying to manoeuvre himself upright.
“Yes, please,” he gasped, sounding to El very different - and altogether more compliant - than the man she’d recently seen argue NHS budget cuts with Nicky Campbell on Central Weekend.
“Yes please what?” said a voice that was recognisably Karen’s - albeit a sterner and more authoritarian Karen than El was used to.
“Yes please, Mistress,” said Henderson, breathing heavily.
“Not good enough,” said Karen.
There was a whoosh of air, a squeaking of resistant materials against flesh, and one of the off-screen arms reappeared in shot - this time to bring the leather tongue of a riding crop down hard on the sensitive skin of Henderson’s inner thigh.
He cried out, in obvious pain.
“What do you say?” Karen asked him.
“Sorry, Mistress,” he whispered.
“Good,” said Karen, and hit him again, harder.
El winced. Rose laughed, sounding more relaxed and unguarded than El had ever heard her.
“She’s a natural, isn’t she?” Rose said, gesturing to the screen, where an invisible Karen was looming over the supine, whimpering Henderson. “If the grifting doesn’t work out, I can see an entirely new vista of opportunity opening up for her.”
“I’m not sure it’s something she wants to cultivate,” said El, and Rose laughed again.
The riding crop flicked back into the shot - this time to caress Henderson’s cheek.
“You’re doing well,” Karen said - changing gears, her tone tender rather than commanding.
“Thank you, Mistress,” said Henderson quietly, arching his back and neck to press his face against the leather tongue.
“So well,” said Karen, “that I’m going to give you a reward. A little treat. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Good boy.”
She picked that one up from Ruby, El thought.
A hand entered the shot, in extreme close-up, its blurred fingers appearing to reach directly for the camera. Then the hand changed course, vanishing from the frame - only to reappear a second later, an old-fashioned glass vial half-filled with snow-white powder clasped between its thumb and forefinger.
The camera moved closer to the bed, shaking back and forth with every step Karen took, until Henderson’s face and upper body filled the screen - beads of sweat discernible on his forehead, his breath erratic.
A finger - Karen’s finger - returned to press against the side of his nose, sealing off one nostril. A hand was thrust, palm down, against his upper lip.
The tip of the glass vial came back into view, now uncorked - tilted forward by the unseen camerawoman until its powder contents spilled out in a thick, rough line onto the back of the hand, directly under Henderson’s nose.
(“It’s marvellous stuff,” Sita had said, pushing the vial of coke down until it sat snugly in Karen’s other breast-cup. “The man I bought it from said it was the best he’d ever had. Our Mr Henderson will be seeing stars after you’ve given it to him. Seeing galaxies.”
“And you don’t think,” Karen had replied, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she struggled to get comfortable under her layer of latex, “that he might have had, you know... an ulterior motive for telling you that? What with you emptying your wallet at him for half a gram?”
“Oh, hush,” said Sita, pulling the straps of the corset tighter at the back, until Karen’s breasts bulged formidably out in front. “You young people - you’re always so cynical”).
“Time to take your medicine,” said Karen offscreen, her second hand snaking back into shot to caress Henderson’s damp, greying hair.
He lurched forward, pushing his open nostril as far towards the line as his cuffs would allow, and hoovered it up in two rapid snorts.
“And the rest,” Karen ordered.
He pressed his lips to her hand, opened his mouth and licked the remaining powder from her skin hungrily, then leaned back against the bed, muscles taut as wire but a sated, delirious look in his wide, pink eyes.
“Now,” she told him, her voice - and El, imagined, her body language - communicating the absolute impossibility of his disobeying, “I’m going to go next door, and you’re going to stay here. Maybe I’ll come back, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll leave you here for the housekeeper to find in the morning. But - and this is very important - you will not move from this bed. Do you hear me, Seymour? Are you listening?”
“Yes, Mistress,” he answered, teeth chattering - from fear, arousal, the strength of the coke or a combination of all three, El wasn’t sure.
(“It wasn’t all made up, what I told him about Henderson and the girl in Surbiton,” Kat had told El, the night she’d come back from Chestnut House after she’d failed to seduce Marchant. “You know - the girl with the dungeon. Rose sent me down to talk to her the other week, before she dragged you into all this.”
“She’d already started the con then?” El had asked, surprised.
“Oh, yeah. She’s a forward-planner, that one. Always six steps ahead of where you
expect her to be”).
The camera made a sharp 90-degree turn, so that it faced a second room connected to the first by a whitewashed door, pulled halfway open to reveal a writing desk, a frayed loveseat and a bookcase stacked with Penguin Classics and Jeffrey Archer paperbacks - the sitting room of Henderson’s Tower Hill bolthole, the residence he hadn’t declared to his wife and constituents. Karen stepped inside; the camera swivelled around again as she booted the door shut with a firm front-kick, the ball of her foot almost splintering the cheap wood as it connected, and then settled on a closed sash-window, its dusty blinds drawn.
“Right, you lot,” Karen whispered from behind the camera, and she was speaking directly to El now, to Rose and Ruby and the rest of the audience at home, “it’s done. And I bloody hope you got all the footage you wanted, because I’m telling you now - I am not touching that cage again.”
———
“You sure you don’t mind doing this?” El had asked Karen earlier, when the two older women had left and she and Karen had found a coat in Rose’s wardrobe that was long enough and dark enough to mask the latex and leather underneath.
“You offering to step in?” Karen had replied, flashing her a grin that reminded her a little bit of Dexter and lot of Ruby.
“Not sure I’d be able to keep a straight face, knowing what he’s into.”
“Sure you would. I mean, you’ve got incentive to make this one work, haven’t you? We all have.”
El paused, playing the last sentence back to herself.
“What do you mean?” she asked warily. Did Karen know, about Marchant and her mother? Had Rose told her? Had Ruby?
“Don’t look so worried,” Karen said, catching the change in El’s expression. “I just assumed you were like the rest of us, that’s all. That you had some sort of history with Marchant that made you want to bring him down.”
“Have you been talking to Ruby?”
“About you? No. Didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell. Whatever beef you’ve got with that cunt, whatever skeletons of his are rattling round in your closet, she’s keeping schtum about ‘em. None of my business, is it?”
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