The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

For a moment, El hated her. Hated the narrow, middle-class parameters of her moral compass, her belief - implicit but louder than bombs - that only two types of women could ever do sex work: the blameless ones, the ones who’d been coerced into it and couldn’t get away, and the others, the scarlet women who’d chosen it, who’d rather walk the streets than do an honest day’s work on an assembly line or stacking shelves in Tesco. Innocent sheep and profligate goats.

  Which category, El wondered, would she think El’s mother fell into?

  “It was Marchant’s doing,” Hannah continued. “If anyone put her there, it was him.”

  ———

  “My dad was an engineer,” Kat had told Hannah, apropos of nothing.

  “Alright,” Hannah had said, confusion heaping itself on to the embarrassment and awkwardness that had gripped her after Kat’s initial revelation.

  “Well, I say ‘engineer’… He was a bit more senior than that, really. Owned his own company, a couple of factories, that sort of thing. Made vacuum cleaners, blow dryers, food mixers… you name it. Fancied himself as a bit of an inventor too - a bit of a George Stephenson type, you know? Forever tinkering away on something in his workshop.”

  She paused.

  “And I expect you want to know why I’m bringing him up, after what I just told you?” she said.

  “Perhaps a little,” Hannah replied cautiously.

  Kat wound down the window; took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, releasing pure white contrails of smoke into the dark air outside.

  “It all comes back to Marchant,” she said, watching the smoke twist and coil from her open mouth. “Just like bloody everything. He ruined my dad, see. Took everything he had. And when the business was gone, and the house, and they found him hanging in the woods - well, that was when I ended up in Pill.”

  ———

  He rarely used its real name, its official name, and he never told them exactly how it worked. But she was a nosy kid, always peering round corners and listening through walls, and she’d picked up enough to know that it was some kind of engine component - but for ships’s engines, not cars’s. Something to make them move faster through the water, more efficiently.

  He’d been working on it for the best part of a year - first in his shed in the garden and then, after a while, in the dedicated workspace he’d carved out in a backroom of the factory over in Holt.

  He called it The Prototype, with a capital P and a definite article she’d heard in his voice long before she ever saw it written down.

  It didn’t look like much to her - just a load of valves and horns and bolts, a little grey elephant of a thing that, even if it wasn’t an engine, could easily have fitted under the bonnet of a car. Nothing at all like the other engines she’d seen in some of her dad’s books: the Difference Engine that could have doubled as a church organ, the rocket-sized marine propulsion systems that wouldn’t have been out of place in an industrial dairy.

  “It’s a turbocharger,” her sister Jan had told her, when she’d come down for one of her weekend visits. “You put it on top of the engine - or into it, or something. Makes it go quicker.”

  Jan was 19 then, living down in Pontypool with an apprentice heating technician named Eoghan who had her convinced of his mechanical genius.

  “Why’s it so small, then?” Kat had asked.

  “Because it’s a prototype,” Jan had told her, disgusted by breadth of the 12 year old Kat’s ignorance. “What it is, is a model. It’s not meant to actually go in the ship - just show how it’d work, if it did. For demonstration, like.”

  “But it would work, would it? In real life?”

  “You’d best hope so,” Jan had said, shrugging. “Sunk just about everything into it, Da has. You know Gareth Price, who works at the building society? I saw him down the pub last night. He said Da’s been taking out loans left, right and centre to pay for the parts. On the house, on the business, you name it.”

  Kat had heard of older siblings who, after the death of a parent, had become protective; had stepped in overnight to play a parental role for their younger brothers and sisters. That wasn’t Jan. She’d only got harder, after their Ma had passed - less patient of Kat’s naivety, less inclined to shield her from harsh realities. It had been a relief when she’d moved in with Eoghan; more so, when the two of them had moved down south.

  “What’s he going to do with it, when he’s finished it?” said Kat.

  “Fucked if I know,” said Jan. “Gareth said he’d got a buyer lined up, though. Someone interested, anyway. Some big cheese in shipping and haulage, Gareth said. England’s answer to Aristotle Onassis.”

  Kat hadn’t known who Aristotle Onassis was, but had also known better than to say so in front of Jan.

  “He’ll make the money back, then?” she’d asked instead.

  “If he doesn’t fuck it up,” Jan said, “and if that Prototype works as well as he says it does... then he’ll do a lot more than that. You’d be looking at triple, quadruple the amount he’s spent on it already. More, even.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow’s about right. I just hope he spreads some of it around where it’s needed. Not being funny, but some of us could use a bit of a cash injection.”

  ———

  “The Holt factory got broken into about a month after,” Kat said, taking a final drag on her cigarette and throwing the butt out of the window. “They didn’t take much - a few tools, a bit of money from the safe. And the Prototype.”

  Hannah, who’d sat through enough interviews with talking heads and politicians to know when it was better to listen and let other people talk, stayed quiet.

  “It was obvious what they’d been after,” Kat said. “And it was obvious who’d sent them to get it - this shipping bloke, this whoever-he-was Onassis.”

  “Marchant?” Hannah asked.

  “Yep. Not that I could’ve said then who he was. My dad was a secretive old sod when he wanted to be - he hadn’t told anyone the name of his buyer, or any sort of, you know... identifying detail. Hadn’t even put it in his notebook, he was that paranoid. It wasn’t ‘til Rose came calling with that video of hers that I knew enough to say who for certain who it was who’d done it.”

  ———

  That was it, El thought, another piece of the wider picture sliding into place. That was the break-in up north that Karen had talked about. And getting hold of the Prototype, whatever it was - that was Leon Baxter’s last job.

  She studied Karen’s face; watched her grimace, and then pull the muscles in her face back into blankness with impressive self-control as the implications of Kat’s story hit her. Sita looked down into her teacup, still steadfastly refusing to make eye contact. Ruby was impassive, but there was a crease between her eyebrows deep enough to suggest that this last bit of information had taken even her by surprise.

  All these women’s lives, tangled up together like fishhooks, El thought. And none of them knew how much, until we got started.

  None of them but Rose.

  ———

  “The bank took the factories first,” Kat told Hannah, spraying her wrists and neck with heavy vanilla perfume and popping a stick of peppermint gum in her mouth. “It took them a while to come for the house - it wasn’t quick, you know? More this sort of long, drawn-out parade of red bills and bailiffs and the electric getting cut off. We were staying in a B&B in Llangollen when he topped himself.”

  “I had to move in with Jan and Eoghan pretty sharpish. Wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was that or the children’s home in Wrexham, and we’d all heard the stories about what happened up there. Jan was a fucking chocolate teapot, but Eoghan tried to make me feel at home, bless him. I can’t say I made it easy for them, either, bunking off school and smoking weed and what have you. Then I met a boy from Newport - well, a man, really - and ended up more or less living with him. And he turned out to be... well, not so nice, put it that way. Who’d have seen that coming, eh? And b
efore you know it, it’s midnight and I’m out on Commercial Road with a mini-skirt barely covering my arse giving handjobs to dirty old men in alleyways for three quid a go.”

  This time, Hannah grimaced. Kat chuckled.

  “Offended your sensibilities, have I?” she said. “Sorry about that.”

  “I wasn’t...” Hannah protested, and then stopped. There was another car on the road behind them, its make and colour all but obscured by the blinding brightness of its headlights.

  The car accelerated, moving so close behind them that Hannah could keep her vision free of its glare only by turning her head away from the mirrors. It swerved right to overtake them, giving her a momentary glimpse of something long, sleek and black - a Jaguar or an American sedan, its smoked glass obscuring the driver inside.

  Then, when it was perhaps 50 feet ahead of them, it swerved again, swinging back horizontally into the left lane - their lane - until it was blocking the road ahead with its body.

  ”Go around it,” said Kat, sounding panicked. “Just fucking go around it.”

  But Hannah, on autopilot, had already slowed the BMW; was already pressing a foot down onto the brake.

  ———

  “I don’t know why I did it,” Hannah told them, hanging her head. “I don’t know why stopping was my first reaction.”

  “Bound to be,” said Ruby. “It’s basic road safety. Sort of thing you get drummed into you as soon as you start driving. You see something stop dead right in front of you, you stop dead yourself before you hit it.”

  “I should have gone around it,” Hannah said. Then: “But it doesn’t change the point I’ve been trying to make. Kat didn’t want to stop then. She wouldn’t have wanted us to stop now. Marchant hurt her, every bit as much as he hurt all of you.”

  “And now he’s hurt her again, hasn’t he?” said Ruby.

  “Yes, he has. Which is all the more reason for us to keep going - to finish this. Because if it was worth us doing it before - well, are you really going to tell me that it isn’t worth it now?”

  Hannah sat up straight; looked right at Ruby. Ruby stared back.

  ———

  The door opened, and a pair of frock-coated Chestnut House porters, both young and extravagantly bearded, entered the basement room, wheeling between them an antique dining trolley. On the trolley lay half a dozen silver serving dishes, their lids removed to reveal lamb steaks and mint sauce, French beans and new potatoes. Two bottles of wine, one white and one red, sat uncorked beside the dishes.

  “I don’t remember ordering this,” said Marchant.

  The taller of the porters, his nostrils and forehead still freckled with teenage blackheads, stepped forward, pre-emptively shielding his colleague from the brunt of Marchant’s ire.

  “It’s lunchtime, sir,” he said. “Your assistant told us you’d like to have lunch when she made your booking.”

  “What I’d like,” said Marchant, “is a little privacy. Is that too much to ask?”

  Another figure appeared in the doorway, behind the porters: a woman, tall and elegant, her make-up a perfectly-applied mask and her suit impossibly well-tailored.

  Hannah, in her warpaint.

  “How do you do it?” she asked Marchant, ignoring the others. “How do you sit there, eating, after the things that you’ve done?”

  She was good; better than El had expected she would be.

  “I’m sorry, who are you?” said Marchant. “Or rather, what the hell are you doing down here? This is a members’s club, not Victoria station. You can’t just walk in off the street.”

  He’s lying again, El thought. He recognises her. He might not know yet why he recognises her, but the way he’s looking at her - he’s seen her before. She’s not a total stranger.

  Hannah stepped forward, further into the room.

  “You think you can hide from it,” she said, her voice steady. “That if you burrow down in your rathole, then nobody will find out. But you’re wrong.”

  “Find out?” said El, planting the smallest seed of concern into Alison Miller’s delivery. “Find out what?”

  Hannah twisted her body towards her, eyes blazing.

  She’s very good, thought El.

  “What he is,” Hannah told her. “What he’s done. He’s a murderer. A murderer, and worse.”

  “Forgive me for asking,” said Marchant to the porters, “but could one of you please do your fucking job and remove this woman?”

  Hannah raised her hands, palms up.

  “No need,” she said, “I’m going. But consider this a warning shot,” she added to Marchant. “I have proof, you see. Proof of the things you’ve done. So enjoy your wine and your lunches. Because I don’t plan to keep it to myself for long.”

  She smiled at him, lips curling wide enough to show her gumline - then, as suddenly as she’d entered, turned her back on them and walked out into the passageway, the click of her heels echoing along the flagstones.

  A moment later the porters, shell-shocked, took off after her.

  Marchant, by contrast, seemed relaxed - entirely unfazed by the incident. He extended a leg towards the dining trolley; hooked a foot behind one wheel and pulled it towards the table.

  Relaxed, El told herself, or just a hell of an actor.

  “I’ve always thought the security here a little lax,” he said. “Seems fair to say I was right, doesn’t it? There’s a mental health facility two streets away, you know. Out-patient, as well as in.”

  He paused.

  “Everything alright, Alison?” he asked.

  She probably looked anxious, she thought. But perhaps the appearance of anxiety wasn’t so bad, under the circumstances.

  “I don’t enjoy surprises, James,” she said slowly. “Surprises can blindside you. They can derail campaigns. So I’m going to ask you this once, and I have to insist that you’re honest with me when you answer: is there something I ought to know, before we go any further? Are there any surprises likely to crawl out of the woodwork between now and the election?”

  He snatched a single French bean from the trolley with his fingers; bit into it with apparent relish.

  “Absolutely none,” he said.

  Chapter 23

  Edgware

  1996

  Ruby dropped a custard cream into her coffee, added two more lumps of sugar and then, when she’d judged the biscuit sufficiently soggy, fished it out with a tea spoon and ate it.

  “I don’t know what you wanted to meet here for,” she told El, curling up like a stately housecat in her yellow wingback chair. “Ain’t we seeing enough of each other at Rose’s?”

  “I imagine she has a few questions for us,” said Sita from the sofa, “and she thought it might be easier to ask them here rather than there. Questions about Rose, perhaps. Isn’t that right, darling?”

  El was wrong-footed. She’d thought insisting on speaking to them both at Ruby’s flat, urgently - but not telling them why - would put her in the driving seat; would give her a bit of control over the course of the conversation that ensued. But as Ruby never tired of reminding her, they were clever old birds. And anything she’d learned, in the past two months - any new data point she’d collected, any tiny insight she’d unearthed - they seemed to know already, and to know more besides. The way they did now.

  “You mean Olivia?” said El, playing her strongest card first.

  Neither of them gave her the reaction she’d been hoping for.

  “Told you about that, then, did she?” she Ruby mildly, reaching for another custard cream.

  “I must say, I’m glad she felt she could,” said Sita. “She doesn’t trust easily. Though who would, in her position?”

  “And you didn’t think to mention it before?” El asked. “Say, when you first roped me into this?”

  Ruby chewed at the biscuit contemplatively.

  “I’ve kept it to myself for nigh on 30 years,” she said. “Both of us have. We didn’t know no other way to keep her safe. S
o we weren’t about to go spreading it around now, were we?”

  To her irritation, El found herself agreeing with the logic of the statement, the bubble of her indignation deflating. What other way was there but secrecy and silence to keep Rose out of Marchant’s crosshairs?

  “I wish you’d told me,” she said.

  “I wish we could have,” said Sita. “I really do.”

  El took a sip of her own coffee.

  “What I don’t understand,” she said to Ruby, “is what you were doing at her house in the first place. I assume you were running a job on Marchant - but why go to his mistress’s place, when he only went there himself once a fortnight? Why not his wife’s?”

  “Ah,” said Sita, catching Ruby’s eye.

  “She didn’t tell you that bit, then?” Ruby asked.

  “What bit?” said El.

  “Well,” said Sita, sounding almost sheepish, “the thing is... we were there, you see. With his wife. Or rather, I was...”

  ———

  It started with a chest of drawers.

  “Not just any chest of drawers,” Sita assured her. “A Louis XIV commode - brass and tortoiseshell, absolutely exquisite.”

  The chest - the commode - sold at Sotheby’s in the autumn of 1965 to Mrs Elizabeth Marchant, née Bellman: daughter of retail magnate Saul Bellman, and wife of entrepreneur and property developer James Marchant. Sita read about the sale in the trade press; was immediately captivated by the glossy photograph that accompanied the article, by the intricate Boulle Work that jumped out at her from the page.

  “All I could think,” she said, “was how utterly magnificent it would look in my sitting room. I knew I had to have it.”

  A few discreet but well-placed enquiries into the habits and foibles of Mrs Marchant later, and Sita settled on a plan for liberating the commode from her clutches: the Fortune Teller.