The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  The journey took hours. In the front, the two women spoke amongst themselves in low voices, letting Olivia hear only snippets of their conversation.

  “They’ll have to move,” Ruby said, as they passed Bletchley. “You can’t just have a 10 year old kid no-one’s ever seen before rock up on your doorstep and not expect the neighbours to ask questions. They’d have child welfare on their backs quick as you can blink. Coppers too, probably.”

  “They’ve already told you they’re happy to relocate,” said Sita. “It’s not as if they’ve put down roots in Barnstaple, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Barnsley,” Ruby corrected her.

  “Barnsley, then. And I’ve had a chat with Ralph Anderson. He can have the documents ready for them by next week, providing we give him the right information and enough time to work.”

  “I bet he can. Fourteen quid for a birth certificate! It’s a bleedin’ crime.”

  "And you made how much from that Henry Moore affair last year? Do remind me.”

  Ruby fell silent, and didn’t speak again until they reached Northampton.

  “What do they even know about bringing up a kid, the pair of them?” she asked quietly, as if she’d been mulling the question, chewing it over long before she’d said it aloud.

  “What did any of us know, before we had them?” said Sita. “They’re prepared to learn, that’s what matters.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot to ask.”

  “Yes, it is. And yet they’ve agreed to it, wholeheartedly. So would you please bring an end to the… what’s that ridiculous expression of yours? Mithering. Stop mithering. You’ve asked, and they’ve accepted. It’s done. A fait accompli.”

  “You must mean business, if you’re pulling out the Latin on me.”

  “It’s French, as you very well know. Now, would you mind keeping your eyes on the road while you’re driving? I’d prefer not to meet my end in the buggy of this horseless hay wagon, if I can possibly help it.”

  They drove on, past Leicester and Loughborough, Nottingham and Derby, the green space around them giving way to brick-fronted factories and high industrial chimneys.

  “Not long now,” Sita said, shifting in her seat so she was facing Olivia.

  Miles came and went. They passed a sign welcoming them to Sheffield; a sinuous row of high-rise council flats, vast and grey and twisting, looming over them from the top of a vertiginous hill.

  “Could we hurry on a little?” asked Sita. “All this Brutalism is giving me a headache.”

  “It’s what you get, when you come out of London,” said Ruby.

  “Appreciative though I am of your devotion to the city,” Sita said, “it’s hardly immune to architectural faux pas. I spent half of last summer working that director at the National, if you recall. I’ve never needed so much aspirin.”

  “Mind what you say, eh?” said Ruby, flashing Sita what Olivia recognised as a not in front of the children look. “Loose lips sink ships, and what have you.”

  To Olivia’s surprise, Sita chuckled.

  “Given where she’s going,” she said, “this kind of talk may be something she needs to get used to.”

  ———

  It was early afternoon when they arrived, Ruby drawing the Anglia to a screeching halt outside a line of wide terraced houses, their bay windows protruding out into the street.

  “Here we are,” she said, grimacing at what Olivia thought must be the northernness, the not-London-ness of their surroundings. “Sunny Barnsley.”

  “Oh, do be quiet,” said Sita, detaching herself gracefully from the passenger seat and pushing it down to free Olivia from the back.

  “Is this where they live?” Olivia asked. “The Ackroyds?”

  “For now,” said Ruby.

  She locked the door of the Anglia, to Sita’s amusement (“is there really any need? It’s hardly a magnet for criminals”) and the three of them walked together to the front door of one of the houses - a neatly-kept two-up two-down with a scrubbed step and a hanging basket fixed to the brickwork.

  The door opened before they could knock, swinging back to reveal a staircase, an expanse of green carpet and, immediately in front of them, a woman. She was older than Ruby and Sita, and somehow more old-fashioned - her curly hair grey and backcombed, her dress protected by a spotted pinafore. There were lines around her green eyes; deep grooves in the corners of her mouth.

  She froze on the spot for a moment, seeing them, then stepped forward - not towards Sita or Ruby, but to Olivia.

  “Hello,” she said gently - the way, Olivia thought, you’d speak to a big dog or a colt, soothing and tentative, so it didn’t bolt or bite you as you stretched out your hand to stroke it. “I’m Diane. And you must be Olivia. I’m so sorry for your loss. But it’s very, very nice to meet you.”

  ———

  “They couldn’t have children,” Rose told El. “Diane had a hysterectomy in the ‘50s, and Arthur had been in prison, so they were never able to legally adopt. They’d been desperate for a child, though, and Ruby knew it. Which I suppose is why it was them she approached in the first place.”

  ———

  “Good to see you, Di,” Ruby said.

  “And you,” said Diane, half her attention still fixed on Olivia. “Now get in here, quick, before someone sees you hanging round my doorstep.”

  She didn’t sound northern, in the way Olivia understood northern accents to sound; nor anything like Ruby, nor as refined as Sita.

  (“She’s from Grantham,” Ruby told her. “Lincolnshire way. It’s a bit of a nothing accent, that one”).

  The house was as neat inside as it was outside, uncluttered and immaculate. In the front room sat a ginger-haired man, apparently waiting for them, his fingers fiddling nervously with the bowl of a pipe.

  Arthur, Olivia thought.

  Even sitting down he was short - small and wiry and compactly-muscled, his simian body built for climbing trees or swinging from the rafters of a big top.

  He was a steeplejack, she found out later; a steeplejack and a thief, adept at roof repairs, construction work and, occasionally, the acquisition and redistribution of fine art, precious stones and high-end automobiles. When she was older, old enough to understand what it was he did and to want to know more, he agreed to take her out with him on a job – choosing for the occasion a low-risk, low-stakes break-in at the top floor of a five-storey museum in Manchester. She’d liked it, so much that, having proved herself a help rather than a liability that first time, she went back with him again and again, learning more each time about pitons and carabiners, about when to wear gloves and when to trust the feel of the ropes under her bare hands. Learning so much that Seb would struggle to understand, during the many mountaineering holidays that punctuated their marriage, how a girl from Rotherham could possibly be so good at scrambling up cliff-faces without even a harness to hold her in place - just as he never quite understood the strange closeness she seemed to share with the two eccentric middle-aged women, her “family friends,” who would materialise in their kitchen from time to time before whisking her away for drinks or dinner.

  Arthur stood up when he saw her, putting his pipe away in his trouser pocket and brushing the residues of tobacco off his palms. He was looking at her, she realised, in the same way that Diane had: anxiously, as if she might run out of the door at any moment.

  “Alright, love?” he asked her, by way of greeting. He did sound northern, she thought; like one of the characters from This Sporting Life.

  Diane settled them into armchairs, then perched herself on Arthur’s wingback, knees pressed together - trying to take up, Olivia thought, as little space as possible. He wrapped a sinewy arm around her; squeezed her shoulder.

  Everyone was tense; Olivia could feel it, the pressure of it gathering over them like storm clouds.

  “Right, then,” said Ruby, when Olivia was just about ready to implode from the weight of it all. “Let’s get down to it, shall we?”


  ———

  “I knew I couldn’t go home,” Rose said. “Even before they told me, I knew. The house was gone, and my mother and Pamela. My Mother had no family, so I’d never had grandparents to speak of, and since my father - since Marchant - had… done what he did, there was no-one left. Nothing to go back to.”

  “The Ackroyds wanted to take me in - that was the gist of what Ruby told us. Told me. They knew about the fire, about my situation, and they wanted to help. To… foster me, I suppose you’d call it. There’d need to be paperwork in place - a forged birth certificate from one of Sita’s contacts in the demi-monde, a handful of other records falsified. But that was easily achieved, or so she said. The plan was to pass me off as Arthur and Diane’s daughter to anyone who asked - schools and doctor’s surgeries and so on.”

  “The issue for them, of course, was that they couldn’t stay in Barnsley. It was a small community, then; small and claustrophobic, or at least what I would find claustrophobic. Everyone intimately familiar with what everyone else is doing. To have a child appear out of nowhere, an unknown child, and to claim that child as your own - it just wasn’t feasible.”

  “What neither Ruby nor Sita had known, but what we’d all discovered that day in their sitting room, was that they’d already started the process of moving. Had started it the day Ruby had first called them from London. Arthur had resigned from his job with the council, and Diane had taken a lease on a new house a handful of miles away, closer to Sheffield. Rotherham wasn’t far, but it was far enough, in those days. Far enough to afford them - afford us - some measure of anonymity.”

  “And people in the new place bought the story?” El asked. “They thought you were their daughter?”

  “As far as I know,” said Rose. “Arthur’s looks helped, I think. People see a man and a young girl both with a shock of red hair, and they tend not to look too closely at their finer features. And as for the rest…”

  ———

  “Me and Sita are going to be sticking around here a couple of weeks,” Ruby said. “Not here here,” she clarified, in response to Diane’s look of horror, “but around here. In the general area, up north. We’ll most likely get a B&B in Sheffield or somewhere.”

  “Or a hotel room, like civilised people,” Sita added.

  “Why?” said Diane - looking, Olivia thought, slightly panicked, as if a gift she’d been given were about to be taken away.

  “You’re going to need help getting her settled in,” Ruby told her. “She’s had a hell of a rough ride this last week, and that sort of thing don’t just disappear. It stays with you. It ain’t going to be easy, the three of you learning how to live together. That’s not all of it, neither. Have you heard the girl talk? She’s a walking elocution lesson. You can tell people you sent her away to boarding school, or what have you, and that’ll go some of the way to explaining it, but we’ll have to at least try to roughen her out a bit round the edges if we’re saying she’s sprung from the two of you. And then there’s her name…”

  ———

  “I couldn’t stay Olivia,” Rose said. “If I was going to stay hidden, have all this new paperwork to protect me from anyone who might come looking for me, then my name, the name my mother had given me… it would have to go. And rationally that made sense to me, of course it did. I was a child, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew I’d be putting myself at risk, if I didn’t listen to Ruby and Sita. But you get rather attached to your name, don’t you? It’s a sort of anchor for your sense of self. With everything else I’d lost, I found the thought of relinquishing mine a little distressing.”

  El, who couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t traded names and identities as easily as lighting a cigarette, nodded.

  “Why Rose?” she asked.

  ———

  “It’s my Mum’s middle name,” she told the room, not meeting anyone’s eye.

  Ruby looked concerned.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Ain’t it a bit risky, choosing one that close to home?”

  She’d gone along with everything they’d suggested so far. Had let them decide for her where she’d live, who she’d be, how she’d speak.

  But on this, she was immovable.

  “It’s the name I want,” she said, challenging Ruby to argue, to fight her on it. “Are you going to stop me from choosing my own name?”

  Ruby stared at her; seemed to consider the costs and benefits of picking this particular battle.

  “Alright,” she said. “Fair enough. Rose it is.”

  ———

  Rose looked down at her arm, at the wrist she’d been cradling.

  “I stayed with Arthur and Diane until I left for university,” she told El. “They never treated me as anything but their daughter. I was their daughter, I suppose, in all but blood.”

  “Arthur died in 1983. Stomach cancer. Diane lived long enough to meet Sophie, but she’d had two strokes already by then, and she wasn’t able to get around without help. We paid for two nurses to live with her when she refused to move down to London, but I think she resented their presence - she was fanatically independent. She died in ’88. And then there was just me and Sophie and Seb.”

  “But Ruby and Sita stuck around?”

  “God, yes. I’m not sure I could have shaken them off if I’d tried. You know what they're like.”

  There was a question El hadn’t asked; an answer she felt she needed.

  “What happened after the fire?” she said. “To the house and… everyone. I assume the police got involved?”

  Rose nodded.

  “It was years before I heard the details,” she said. “There was coverage of the fire on the news, so I knew in very broad strokes what they’d found there. That there were bodies - a woman and at least one girl, possibly more. I found out later that Sita had spoken to one of her friends at the Met, not quite a Commissioner but almost, and he’d fudged some of the information they gave to the press. Suggested that there were two girls in the house, but that one of them was so badly burned that they weren’t able to identify her definitively.”

  “No-one made the connection to Marchant, even when our names were released to the public. I assume he paid the rent in cash. Or gave the cash directly to my mother to pass to the landlord, which feels to me more likely, in light of what we know of him. And nobody ever came looking for me. To all intents and purposes, and certainly for Marchant’s purposes, Olivia Green burned to death in a house fire in 1966.”

  Something else was nagging at her, El realised; not so much an unanswered question as the vestige of a memory, an echo of something she’d seen or heard, but that hadn’t registered as significant at the time. An analogue of Rose’s story, but more recent, and nearer.

  And then she remembered.

  “There was another fire,” she said, trying to call the specifics of the incident to mind as she spoke. “Last year, in Greenwich. Two people died - a woman and a little girl, mother and daughter. They said it was arson, but they never caught whoever did it.”

  Rose smiled, joylessly.

  “Yes,” she said. “That was him. Marchant - my father. His handiwork.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “My investigators were certain of it. That case was the reason I hired them, in fact - I’d read about it, too, and had the same thought you did just now. That it was too great a coincidence, too similar a set of circumstances. A single parent, a rented house in the suburbs, no obvious leads. It was exactly Marchant’s style. I needed to know.”

  “But you didn’t tell the police?”

  “There was nothing to tell. The investigators only made the connection definitively when they interviewed the next door neighbour - showed her pictures of Marchant and asked her if she’d ever met him, ever seen him go into the house. She said she had, that first time - but then when they went back again for more details, she wouldn’t speak to them. Wouldn’t answer the doorbell.”

  “You think Marchant
got to her?”

  “We all assumed so. But regardless of whether he did or didn’t - she was hardly a reliable witness. Getting the Met to scrutinise the comings and goings of one of the richest men in London, a man who also happens to sit on the board of several of the better-known police charities, on the word of a woman who probably wouldn’t have opened the door if they came knocking… well. None of us thought it very likely.”

  “But didn’t Ricky Lomax mention it, when you interviewed him? Wouldn’t that have been something, something your detectives or whatever could have worked with?”

  “Lomax?” Rose said, snorting derisively. “He denied all knowledge of it, absolutely and categorically. Said whole thing sounded like the work of an angry ex-boyfriend. But that if Marchant was behind it - if - then he hadn’t delegated; that he must have done it himself. With his own two hands, the way he had before.”

  Chapter 22

  Soho

  1996

  Seymour Henderson was sweating again. Beads of perspiration gathered on his nose and forehead; wet the furrows of his widow’s peak in the glare and flash of the camera lights.

  “I want to apologise,” he said, bending his head towards the microphone bank in front of him but avoiding eye contact with the cameras, “for the errors of judgement I’ve shown in recent times and the embarrassment I have caused. This apology I extend to my constituents, who put their faith in me and whom I have so terribly let down. To the government with whom I have been lucky enough to work, and the Prime Minister under whom I have been privileged to serve. Above all, I must apologise to my wife Kim, whose love and support over the last 18 years I have so badly abused.”