The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  He paused to take a sip of water; wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief.

  “While I have no one but myself to blame for the situation in which I now find myself,” he continued, “it is with great sadness and regret I announce today that I will be stepping down as Member of Parliament for Silvertown. To those who have contacted me to let me know how terribly I have disappointed them with my actions, I again apologise profusely. To those who have offered their kind words and understanding these last few days, I am profoundly grateful. I am grateful too to my staff, supporters and the network of volunteers who have worked and campaigned so tirelessly on my behalf over the course of three elections. I only wish I could have been more deserving of the faith you have placed in me.”

  “Pathetic,” said Marchant. “Gets caught with his hand in the tin and crumbs all over his mouth and he can’t even admit to enjoying the biscuit. Absolutely pathetic.”

  He pressed a button on the remote control in his hand, and the screen - jutting, improbably, from the antique oak-panelled walls - faded to black.

  If Chestnut House was baroque, a cornucopia of carved wood and gilt edging, brass cornices and glasswork that El had to admit was every bit as immoderate as Kat had described, then the private basement room that Marchant had reserved for their meeting was more so. Their sole light source, three storeys underground, was a set of cast-iron candelabra, dripping hot wax at either end of the banquet table they’d appropriated as a work desk; stuffed badgers, teeth bared and eyes like gimlets, peered out at her from every corner. The widescreen television until a second ago projecting the final death spiral of Seymour Henderson’s political career from three feet above their heads was the room’s sole concession to modernity.

  “You wouldn’t have apologised?” she asked, with Alison Miller’s politely-feigned interest.

  “Weren’t you the one who told me that an admission of weakness wouldn’t be expedient, politically?”

  “In most circumstances it wouldn’t. But occasionally a mea culpa is the only avenue left.”

  “On that,” he said, baring his own teeth in a vulpine grin, “I have to disagree. Even if nobody wants to be heard admitting it these days, everyone knows what men are and what they like. We fight and we fuck, and we’ll happily die doing both if we have to, because that’s how we’re built. It’s encoded in us. There’s no point feeling embarrassed about it, much less denying it to ourselves. People may say they want a New Man, a reconstructed man, but actually what they want is a real man, one who isn’t ashamed of what he is. Take my word for it: things would have gone better for Henderson there if he’d just come out and said, I like whores. I can’t help it, and why should I have to? And by the way, it has no bearing at all on my ability to get your laws passed and your drains unblocked. Oh, perhaps you’d get some blowback at first - from talking heads, and feminists, and the media morality police. But I absolutely guarantee you: you’d have the understanding of almost every man in this country. And some of the women, too.”

  You don’t actually believe that, though, do you? El thought. You’re trying to goad me into arguing, to see how much objectionable commentary I’ll take before I bite back. And I’d put money on you doing the same with everyone you’ve got on the payroll.

  The longer she spent in Marchant’s company, the more convinced she became that nothing of what he said was true - or rather, that nothing of what he said reflected an essential self, a quiddity that she could deconstruct or begin to understand. She’d gone into the job expecting a monster - and certainly what she’d found was monstrous, but not entirely in the way that she’d anticipated. The crimes he’d committed, the violence he’d enacted had suggested a degree of complexity, from a distance; had built a picture in her mind of a multifaceted Hannibal Lecter of a man, one struggling to reconcile the darkness of his fantasies with the demands of his public life.

  What she’d found instead, at least up to now, was a kind of void - an absence. There was still margin for error, for having entirely misjudged him - and she knew better than most the impossibility of ever really getting inside someone’s head - but it increasingly seemed to her that he, and by extension his actions, were motivated not by sadism or any pleasure taken in the kill, but by convenience. Where other people proved themselves roadblocks, he removed them - it was that simple. It wasn’t that he hated or wanted, she thought; more that he didn’t care for much of anything beyond his own self-interest.

  She didn’t know which idea was harder to bear: her mother beaten and strangled and buried by an out and out misogynist, one who’d actively enjoyed her suffering; by a man who’d kill her because she’d irritated him, or asked the wrong question at the wrong moment, or - and this, she thought, was perhaps the worst option of all - by one who’d chosen her to indulge his morbid curiosity, his interest in killing because, from his perspective, she really didn’t matter at all.

  And why would she have done, to him? To someone who’d burn his own kids to a cinder to protect himself from fallout?

  “Can I assume that won’t be your first public statement on the matter?” she said calmly - denying him, she hoped, the satisfaction of whatever rise he’d expected to get from her.

  He laughed, but it rang false, the way so many of his reactions seemed to.

  That’s because they are false, she told herself. There’s nothing authentic about them. They’re a performance of humanity; a simulacrum, not the real thing.

  “We should talk about the video,” he said.

  They’d agreed on a short campaign video as the best means of introducing Marchant at his debut press conference. Two minutes long and modelled after the multimedia efforts of campaigning American congressmen, it would communicate, as succinctly as possible, the myriad accomplishments of Brand Marchant before the man himself took to the stage: the wealth, the power, the glory.

  I don’t have to do this, it would say. I have everything I could ever need already. But I want to do it. For you, and for Britain.

  What they hadn’t agreed, but what El - and Rose, and Ruby and Sita and the others - had already decided, was that Karen would be the one to make it.

  ———

  “This ends now,” Ruby had said, when El and Rose had gone back to Ledbury Road from the hospital, heavy-limbed and almost delirious from lack of sleep. The atmosphere in the house was thicker than treacle, the air in the kitchen where the remaining women sat a fug of stale coffee and exhaustion. Before Ruby’s pronouncement, none of them had spoken a word; only cradled their hot drinks and empty mugs, avoiding one another’s eyes. Sita wasn’t even pretending to read.

  “And you’ve just decided that for everyone?” El had replied belligerently - objecting more to Ruby’s tone than to the sentiment itself. Because they probably should stop, she thought. Stop, and back away, before any more of them got hurt.

  “You think different, do you?” Ruby said, raising her voice. “Even after seeing your mate’s head stoved in with a tyre iron?”

  Hannah had winced at the words; pulled the blue wool blanket she had wrapped around her tighter against her body.

  She’d changed her clothes - exchanging the gore-spattered blouse and jacket for a baggy yellow t-shirt that had probably belonged to Seb, once. But she hadn’t washed or showered, and her hair was still matted with blood, her face still streaked with it. She looked haunted, paler than she ever had.

  She must know as well as the others how bad things look, El thought; how much damage whatever weapon Marchant’s men had used on Kat had done. How easily it could have been her wheeled into the operating theatre; her in intensive car, hooked up to a ventilator in the bed next to Kat’s.

  “I think,” El said slowly, reining in her anger, “that all of us should have a say in where we go next. We all signed up; we should all get a chance to decide whether we stop or change tack or keep going the way we planned.”

  “I ain’t having any more of you lot hurt,” Ruby said. “Not for him.”


  The unexpected softness of her tone made El hesitate, and she saw, for a second, not the tough-but-protective old lady she was used to - the mother-hen with a sharp tongue and a steel-trap of a mind who’d sat her down one day in a courtyard in Edgware and showed her how to work, how to think - but shades of someone else, someone more vulnerable: of the woman, El’s own age or younger, who’d run headlong into a burning house with nothing between her and the smoke but a scarf pulled over her face to drag a kid she barely knew to safety. Who’d had no choice but to let another kid be taken by the fire.

  “We won’t be,” said Rose, equally gentle.

  She’s remembering too, El thought.

  “Do we think he knows?” Karen asked.

  “Knows what?” said Ruby, rubbing at her temples.

  “About us. Who we are, what we’re doing.”

  “There’s no reason to think so,” said Sita. She took a sip of her tea - masala chai, hot and sweet and smelling of cardamon and ginger. Something she drank, El knew, only when she needed comfort.

  “He went after Kat because she gave him Henderson,” Rose said, sounding every bit as drained as she looked. “He wanted to make sure there was no connection between Henderson’s resignation and his campaign. That’s all. Hannah, I’m afraid, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I realise,” she added, turning to Hannah, “that I bear much of the blame for that. I’m really very sorry.”

  “It’s alright,” said Hannah, pulling the blanket even tighter.

  “No point laying blame,” said Ruby. “Not now. What we need to be doing now is working out where to go from here. And I’m telling you, we ought to pull out. Let things lie for a bit.”

  “Should we, though?” said Karen, pensively rolling a screwdriver between her fingers. “I mean - I can only speak for myself here, but Marchant… he’s the reason I’ve never met my old man. Thinking about him is what keeps my mum awake at night, you know what I mean? And I get what you’re saying, about what happened to Kat and keeping the rest of us out of harm’s way… but if he doesn’t know about us, then we’re still in the clear, right? We’re still safe. So if we can still work the job, still bring him down, and it don’t hurt nobody else… then I want to. I think I sort of have to.”

  El had never heard her sound so polite; so hesitant.

  “And the rest of you?” said Ruby.

  El shrugged noncommittally.

  “Ask me tomorrow,” she said. “Or after I’ve slept. I can’t string a coherent sentence together in this state, let alone make a decision.”

  “I’m not sure that I can, either,” said Rose. “All I know as things stand is that I have no interest in putting the rest of you in the firing line on my behalf. Ruby’s right - there’s too much risk, too many uncertainties. God knows I want my pound of flesh as much of the rest of you… but Marchant’s a killer. And I can’t be responsible for exposing you to that, not again. So I suppose what I’m saying for now is: if there is a vote, then I abstain. You must make whatever decision you make for yourselves.”

  “Sita?” asked El.

  Sita took another sip of tea - slowly enough, El thought, to buy herself time to compose her thoughts before she gave a definitive answer.

  “I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with Ruby,” she said, with none of her usual bite or good humour. “If we can’t guarantee your safety, then I don’t see that we can justify continuing.”

  She lowered the cup of tea back down to the table with a thump. Its landing had the finality of a judge’s gavel.

  “No,” said Hannah quietly.

  Every one of them turned to look at her.

  “Something you want to say, sweetheart?” Ruby asked her.

  Hannah drew herself up to her full height, inasmuch as that was possible from a sitting position, and lay one of her hands on top of the other, suddenly composed. There was blood, still, under the nails.

  She was a journalist, El remembered. A broadcaster. It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that she knew how to pull herself together under pressure.

  “I don’t want to stop,” Hannah said. “I hear what you’re all saying, and I appreciate your concern for my welfare - and for Kat’s - but as Karen said: I have to do this. I lost a husband and a child to this man. I’ve given up my career, my friends, what’s left of my mental health to try to drag what he’s done into the light of day. So please, please - don’t ask me to put the brakes on now. Not when we’re so close.”

  She sank back into her chair and pulled the blanket back around herself, as if the effort of holding court had sapped her strength.

  The others, unused to her speaking out on anything, took a beat to react.

  “You ain’t thinking clearly,” said Ruby, without judgement. “Makes sense, after what’s happened to you. But you’ll feel different once you’ve rested up.”

  “I’m thinking perfectly clearly,” said Hannah. “Do you genuinely believe, after everything, that I don’t understand the risks involved? I choose to keep going. And if you think you’re somehow honouring Kat or paying her respect by pulling back now, I can absolutely tell you that it’s not what she would want.”

  “And how can you be sure what she would want?” said Sita.

  “She told me. In the car, before we… On the way to Berkhamsted. We were both a little anxious, after Marchant’s phone call and the discussion it generated here. I asked her outright if she thought we were doing the right thing in driving up there, if she ought to be meeting Marchant at all. And she said yes. 100%, yes.”

  ———

  The BMW took the unlit country lanes of south Hertfordshire at a steady, unwavering 30. It was one of Ruby’s, clean and well-maintained and stored for the most part in a double-door lockup in Colindale, side-by-side with the half-dozen other cars she kept for the jobs that might need them. More importantly, for Kat’s purposes, it was custom-made - the licence plate a mock-up, the VIN number untraceable.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Hannah asked again, both hands fixed anxiously to the steering wheel.

  “Wouldn’t have said I was if I wasn’t, would I?” said Kat. She pulled down the passenger visor; reapplied her lipstick in the mirror by the murky halogen reflection of the headlamps.

  “Aren’t you at all nervous, coming to meet him?”

  “Oh, give it a rest, would you? You’re starting to sound like Violet bloody Kray back there.”

  ———

  Ruby snorted.

  “Called me that, did she?” she said. “Cheeky cow.”

  There was no malice there, El thought. Just amusement and under it, sadness.

  The creep of a blush spread across Hannah’s cheekbones, joining the darker layer of dried blood that speckled them.

  “I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I’m sure she didn’t mean…”

  “Calm down,” said Ruby. “I’ve been called worse in my time, believe me.”

  Usually, El realised, Sita would have filled the silence that followed with a quip - something dry and laconic about Ruby’s past misadventures that would open the door to the call-and-response bickering that they’d carried on, in one form or another, for thirty years or more.

  Instead, she sat quietly at the table, staring down at her teacup.

  ———

  Kat pursed her lips in the mirror – then, apparently satisfied with what she saw, closed the visor.

  “Honestly,” she said, “Do you lot think I’m made of glass, or what?”

  “They’re just concerned,” said Hannah. “We all are.”

  “Well, don’t be. I did two years on Commercial Road in Pill before I was 18. I survived that, then I can manage this, thank you very much.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with... wherever that is.”

  “Not spent much time in Newport, then? No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. It’s not exactly Bond Street, Commercial Road.”

  She looked out of the window at the shadowy open countryside surrou
nding them on either side; tapped out the first few notes of The Entertainer on the glove compartment with one long, lacquered nail.

  “It’s the red light district,” she said, after a while. “Wall to wall working girls, morning and night. Bit like King’s Cross, if you took away the nightclubs and the stations and it was in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “And you… worked around there?” asked Hannah tentatively, eyes fixed to the empty road ahead of them.

  To her surprise, Kat laughed.

  “Too bloody English for your own good, you are,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Yes, I worked around there. And before you kill yourself trying to find a polite way of asking me what it was I did, I’ll tell you: I was selling it, the same thing every other girl was doing.”

  Hannah’s reddening cheeks were visible through the darkness.

  ———

  If El was surprised, it wasn’t by the way that Kat had made her money, once upon a time. All of them, she assumed, had done things they’d regretted, through bad luck or circumstance or their own poor judgement. Certainly, she had.

  No; if anything surprised her, it was Kat’s willingness to disclose it so readily. And to Hannah of all people - a woman whose knowledge of the world of prostitution was likely gleaned less from any first-hand experience than from Channel 4 documentaries and purple-prose accounts of Victorian London.

  “Did you know?” she asked - to Ruby, and to Rose.

  “That she’d been on the game?” Ruby replied. “She might’ve mentioned it, yeah.”

  Rose didn’t answer. Perhaps, El thought, she’d really meant it in the hospital, when she’d talked about respecting other people’s privacy - the secrets they’d shared with her directly, and the ones she’d bought from Lomax.

  “She was sixteen,” said Hannah. “A child. She didn’t choose it.”