“You have to leave,” she told John eventually, when she began to come back to herself.
“What?”
“Leave. You have to. I’ll need to call the police, and they mustn’t find you here when they arrive.”
He didn’t answer - knowing, she thought, that she was right, but not wanting to acknowledge the fact. Not wanting to be that man - the kind of man who would crawl away like a coward to save his own career, who would leave a woman on her own to deal with the aftermath of a death. Her husband’s - their husband’s - death.
“Go now,” she said, surprising herself with her composure, the clarity of her thinking, “and there’ll be no questions. No one turning up at your chambers to ask what you were doing in the bedroom of a married couple in the middle of the night. No one wondering to themselves why they’ve never seen you with a woman, why you’ve never been married yourself. Stay, and it will come out, all of it. Everything about us, about our lives. You know it will. And with Seb’s name, and yours - I wouldn’t be surprised if it made the papers, too. The gossip columns.”
“I can’t just... go,” he said quietly.
“Yes, you can. I’ll tell anyone who asks that you dropped me at the door after dinner and went straight home.”
“Rose...”
“Please, John. Now. Before we wake Sophie. I don’t want her to see this.”
He nodded, ashamed.
“Please call me,” he said as he left. “As soon as you can.”
She promised him that she would. Wondered, as she heard the front door click closed behind him, whose reputation she was really protecting. Whose privacy.
———
“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” Rose said. “That was what I was told, afterwards. An enlarged heart. Hereditary, and sudden-onset. Seb would have had no idea he had it - it’s the type of thing you usually see in young marathon runners or football players, boys who collapse on the pitch in the middle of a match.”
She pushed the ashtray, now half-full, back towards El - a cigarette still burning in her own hand. To El’s surprise, she’d smoked at least three of her own as she’d talked - Gauloises, dark and tarry, taken from a packet she evidently kept hidden from Sophie on the highest shelf of a cupboard.
“It was all so absurd,” she said softly. “A heart attack at 38, for God’s sake. He tomcats his way around New York and San Francisco in the middle of a bloody plague, climbs Kilimanjaro at the weekends - and it’s a heart attack that gets him.”
“John’s never recovered - Seb was the love of his life. I wonder sometimes if he was the love of mine. Having him there, he and Sophie - I think perhaps it kept me grounded. Tethered to something, you know? And when he was gone...”
She took a long drag on her cigarette; pulled the smoke deep into her lungs.
“When he was gone,” she said, “there was nothing to stop me; no one to tell me I ought not to do something. And the plans I had, the... darker impulses - there was less and less reason not to act on them. Which is how, I suppose, we’ve ended up here.”
Chapter 18
Bankside
1996
“What you are,” El told Marchant, in Alison Miller’s voice, “is a clean slate. You’re James Marchant, entrepreneur - but you’re also not Seymour Henderson. You’re not affiliated with the Tories, with sleaze or corruption. You have no baggage. And the reputation you do have, as a concerned citizen with no obvious Westminster connections, is a distinct advantage here. You’re successful. You’re independently wealthy. There’s no question of you entering politics to line your own pockets, because those pockets are already straining at the seams with the money that you earned with your own two hands.”
“And that’s our tagline, is it?” asked Marchant.
He’s playing his cards close to his chest, El thought. He likes the idea. He doesn’t want me to know he likes the idea - but that’s a Duchenne smile in the corners of his eyes, and he can’t quite keep his mouth from turning up at the edges. He’s excited.
“It’s our position,” she said. “The essential proposition at the heart of your campaign. Everything we do strategically stems therefrom.”
“And how does that look, in practice?”
“As a first step, a soft launch. A very intimate press conference announcing your candidacy - small, just a handful of trusted journalists. I have a few lined up for us, once the Henderson story breaks. I’ve also pre-emptively drafted an announcement speech for the event. It’s succinct, but given the context, I think brevity will work in our favour. We need you assertive - confident, but not loquacious. Chatty men make voters suspicious - at best they see them as apologetic and effeminate, and at worst as habitual liars. Which reminds me: we’ll also need to talk about speech tags and hedging.”
“Hedging? And what the hell are speech tags?”
“Unnecessary rhetorical questions tacked on to statements - a way of asking your audience for confirmation. Don’t you...? and Isn’t it...? - that kind of thing. They make you seem weak, so we’ll need you to avoid them - although you don’t strike me as a man who looks to others for assurance, so perhaps we needn’t worry. And you can take “hedging” as a proxy for any sort of conditional language - all those little modifiers and self-deprecations and uncertainties that tell other people we’re not sure about whatever it is that we’re saying. Whenever you speak, hereafter, you speak authoritatively. The public won’t trust you if you sound like you don’t trust yourself.”
“This is all just style. What about content? What’s the substance of this speech?”
“The style is the substance, at this stage of the game. Policies come later, if they become necessary. Do you think anyone wants to hear, once Henderson resigns, how you propose to mend potholes or keep the library open on a Thursday afternoon? No. They want to see that you’re not a deviant, and they want to believe that you care - about them and about Silvertown. They want reassurance that you won’t squander their money on prostitutes or appear on the cover of the Telegraph with a bin bag over your head and an orange in your mouth. And they want to know that you’ll listen to them - that you’ll be there to receive them when they come to your surgery to complain about the construction work next door, about the care assistant they suspect is stealing from their elderly mother. They want the appearance of sincerity.”
“I’m sure I can manage that.”
“I’m sure you can,” said El, with feeling.
———
She hadn’t wanted to watch the rest of Ricky Lomax’s video testimony - to wade through hour upon hour more of the horrors Marchant had committed and Lomax had willingly concealed, recollected with the same bloodless detachment the big man had applied to the disposal of her mother’s broken body. But she had to know: not because of any need to satisfy a curiosity of her own, but because preventing herself from knowing, consciously avoiding information about the mark would have been idiocy on any job. Dangerous, even. You didn’t go into a con blind; you read, and you learned, and you tried to understand the mark’s buttons and levers and pressure points, however personally repugnant you found them. You did the homework.
Rose had started chronologically, helpfully for El’s purposes - beginning the interview with questions about Lomax’s early days with Marchant, his first exposure to the true nature of his employer and the real demands of the position he’d accepted.
“The first time?” Lomax said, responding to a query asked offscreen. “‘67 - July ‘67. Month or two after I started with him. She was one of his girlfriends. He always had two or three on the go at once, you learned that quick - always out in the suburbs, away from Liz and the kids. Away from Saul too - Saul Bellman, Liz’s old man. He was still going then. Cantankerous old bastard. But it was his money in the business, one of his houses they were living in, so the boss had to keep him sweet, keep him on-side. Wouldn’t have been surprised if he was a bit afraid of him, too. Or at least afraid of the power old Saul had over him. The boss neve
r liked feeling beholden to anyone, know what I mean?”
“Anyway, this girl - Katie something. I’d had her in the car with me once or twice before, driven her up west to go shopping. Nice kid, pretty. I was 20 then, and she couldn’t have been no older, not from the way she talked.”
“One Tuesday lunchtime, he tells me to drive out to check on her, make sure she’s alright. Doesn’t say why. He’s got her stashed in a ground-floor bedsit out Ealing way. Perivale, up near the Hoover Building. I ask if I need to take one of the lads with me, if there’s gonna be any trouble. Not from her, she’s about six stone soaking wet in her drawers, but sometimes there’s brothers or angry boyfriends or an old girl with a rolling pin to think about. But no, he says; don’t take no-one with you. Go, but go on your own.”
———
He rang the doorbell to the girl’s bedsit, but there was no answer - not at first. On the second ring he heard footsteps in the entrance hall, and then the front door opened a few inches, a whey-faced old man in a long white coat crouching behind it.
“I’m here for Katie,” Lomax said, without preamble.
“Did Mr Marchant send you?” the old man asked, voice tissue-paper thin.
Lomax didn’t bother to answer; just brushed the old man aside by his frail shoulders and pushed his way in. The door to the girl’s bedsit was unlocked.
“Please, before you go in there…” said the old man, but Lomax ignored him; stepped into the flat.
He was almost sick when he saw her.
He’d seen bodies crushed before - as a kid in Borstal, then in the ring and out on the cobbles, boys and men with busted teeth, split ears, ivory bone jutting up through torn skin. But never women; never girls.
She was alive, just - he could see her chest moving, up-down-up, with every breath she struggled for. But the blood was everywhere, permeating everything: the sheet that half-covered her, the mattress underneath her, the air he was breathing. And it didn’t smell the way blood ought to - wasn’t sharp or penny-copper like a smashed nose or a shredded lip but rich and meaty like an abattoir, like a butcher’s shop in summer.
There was blood in other places, too. On the dining table, the white sheet on top drenched brown from it; spattered in drops and smears across the lino floor in such a way as to suggest that she’d been moved from the table to the bed.
By the old bloke? Lomax thought. It didn’t seem possible. He had to be 70 if he was a day.
“What the fuck have you done to her?” he said, turning to face him. The man shuddered; mouth trembling and hands shaking, as if the very fact of Lomax was a physical threat.
“An accident,” he said, almost crying. “Only an accident. She was sedated, but she jerked upright when the scalpel went in, and I lost my grip…”
———
“He was a doctor,” Lomax told the camera. “Or he’d been a doctor, way back when. By the time I met him, he’d been struck off 10 years. Got a bit too fond of his own prescription pad was what I heard. That’s when he started working with the girls, the ones who’d got themselves in trouble.”
“He performed terminations?” Rose asked, audible but unseen.
“You didn’t hear the word said,” he replied, through another round of coughing. “Nobody talked about “terminations” or “abortions” or what have you the way they do now. But yeah, that was him, the old geezer. An abortion doctor.”
“And Marchant paid him to work on this girl - on Katie?” said Rose, seeming to make a point of using the girl’s name, of humanising her.
“He must’ve, mustn’t he?” said Lomax, wiping his lips on his sleeve. “I mean, I didn’t exactly ask him afterwards, but it was pretty bleeding obvious from the setup what had happened. He wouldn’t have wanted her walking around carrying his kid if he’d knocked her up, would he? He’d got too much to lose. He’d have had to have dealt with the problem, even if it meant throwing a bit of Saul Bellman’s money at it.”
“So what happened next? After you found her?”
“Not a hell of a lot, at first. The old bloke was running round like a headless chicken, saying it was an accident, wasn’t his fault, his hand slipped - all that. And meanwhile the girl’s just lying there on the bed, bleeding to death.”
“You didn’t try to help her?”
“What do you take me for? Of course I fucking did. I gave her water, tried to get her to eat something. Got her to hold a towel between her legs to try to stop the blood. But I couldn’t exactly call for an ambulance, could I? Not without landing myself back inside, and the boss with me.”
Rose muttered something, the words lost in a crackle of static.
“It took about an hour,” Lomax said, voice fainter than it had been. “For a while she was sweating and shivering, then her lips and her fingers lost their colour, starting turning blue. Then she just… stopped moving. Stopped breathing.”
———
“It was an accident,” the old man repeated, dazed. “Only an accident.”
Lomax didn’t panic. He was paid to not panic - to keep a clear head, assess the situation, decide what needed doing and do it, quickly.
“She got a phone?” he asked the old man.
“I think I saw one in the corridor,” said the man automatically. “But you can’t ring for the police!” he added. “Please, don’t ring for the police.”
Lomax stepped into the man’s space; grabbed the lapels of his white coat and pulled, so that their faces were almost touching and the man’s feet were raised an inch off the ground.
“Do I look like I want the police here, you stupid cunt?” he growled. “Do I?”
The old man didn’t respond. Lomax let his clenched fists open, letting go of his lapels, and the man crumpled to a heap on the blood-streaked floor.
Lomax took off his shoes and walked softly out into the entrance hall, feet making barely a sound as they struck the carpet. He closed the door to the bedsit behind him; considered using one of the picks in his workbag to lock the man inside, then thought better of it. The last thing he needed was attention, and the old man seemed the type to scream and shout and work himself into a state, to bang on the walls and bring the neighbours calling.
He scanned the corridor. Saw the man was right - there was a phone there, right in the corner, balanced on a dusty stack of old newspapers.
He called Marchant at the office.
“Deal with it,” Marchant told him, after Lomax had updated him - very briefly, and very quietly - on the situation in the bedsit.
“How?” Lomax asked - not familiar, then, with Marchant’s foibles, with the gap between what he said and what he expected you to infer. With his obsessive compulsion to tidy up loose ends; to minimise risks to himself, his family life and standing, by systematically removing the evidence of his sins and peccadillos, his mistakes.
“By getting rid of them,” he said. “How else?”
Lomax was startled; thought maybe he’d misunderstood something, somewhere down the line.
“Both of them?” he asked, not expecting the answer to be yes. “Him and her?”
“Yes,” said Marchant, irritated at having to clarify. “Both of them.”
———
“What did you do with them?” Rose asked.
“She was easy,” said Lomax, fiddling with the cannula in his hand. “All I had to do with her was wait ’til it got dark, wrap her up in a bin-bag and drive her out to Uxbridge Hospital. It’s closed down now, but there was a medical waste incinerator on site. I used that one more than once.”
“And the doctor?”
“Bit more challenging. See, I’d made a name for myself before I started with Marchant - served a bit of time, got a bit of a reputation as a bad lad, a hard man. It’s why they took me on. But I’d never done anyone, you know what I mean? Never killed no one. And I tell you, it ain’t as easy as you think it’ll be, that first time.”
———
He had to do it, he knew that. It was part of the j
ob. People had expectations. And it wasn’t as if he had any moral objection to doing him, was it? A bloke who stuck knives up young girls for money, so old he was probably close to pegging it anyway?
But the reality of it - the feel of the old man’s chicken-neck on his thumb pads, the squawking sounds he made as the rope tightened round his throat, the piss streaming down onto Lomax's socks when the man’s bladder gave… none of that was fun. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do it again.
And all the boss said, when Lomax rang him that night to tell him it was done, it was sorted, was: good. That’s one less thing to worry about, isn’t it?
———
Is that how he thinks of me, El wondered - as someone he’ll eventually need to worry about, a loose end he’ll eventually need to tie up?
“The best thing you can do for now,” she told Marchant, with all of Alison Miller’s self-assurance, “is prepare for the press conference. When Henderson resigns - and it will be soon - we’ll have to move very quickly. I’ll need you to be ready.”
Marchant smiled - faintly, humourlessly.
“I’m sure I’ve told you,” he said, “that I don’t have much of an appetite for waiting.”
“And as I’m sure you’ve heard many times in return,” she replied sharply, “some things take time to come to fruition. This is one of those things. You aren’t really going to tell me that a few days is too long for you to keep your powder dry?”
It was a response she knew would antagonise him, just condescending and borderline-emasculating enough to put him on edge.
“Do you always speak this way to the people paying your salary?” he asked, the pitch of his speech dropping an octave in suppressed anger.
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