The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  If she were Marchant, she thought, she’d keep a second office; a clandestine one, entirely separate from and unknown to his wife and father in law.

  The question, again, was: where?

  ———

  “Which is where I came in,” said Ruby.

  “I needed someone to follow him.” Sita said. “To find out where he was going, when he wasn’t at home or at the office.”

  “Someone a bit less conspicuous than Madam Chandravali here,” added Ruby.

  “Your Auntie Ruby always was a dab hand with a pair of binoculars,” said Sita. “And I appreciate you wouldn’t immediately think so, but she can blend really quite masterfully into the background when she needs to.”

  El had seen this unexpected talent of Ruby’s for herself, more than once, in the course of a job, and the unlikely marriage of woman and skill had never failed to surprise her. The experience was not dissimilar, she thought, to happening upon an elderly and asthmatic Yorkshire terrier that could, when it wanted to, dance a perfect merengue.

  “Weren’t easy, I’ll tell you that much,” Ruby said. “Do you know how many blocks of flats he owned by then, how many houses? And not just in London - all over the bleedin’ country. I swear to God, I spent half that October speeding round backroads after him when he went to look in on ‘em.”

  “I don’t know why you did,” said Sita. “I told you he wouldn’t be keeping anything in any of them. They were Saul’s properties too - he’d never have taken the risk.”

  “You couldn’t’ve known that for sure, though, could you?” Ruby argued. “It was guesswork.”

  “I trust my instincts. They’ve been good to me, so far.”

  “And I like to have a bit more evidence before I jump to conclusions, thank you very much.”

  El snorted at the sheer audacity of the lie.

  “Anyway,” said Ruby, shooting El a look that suggested there’d be significantly fewer custard creams and cups of coffee in her future if she’d didn’t watch her manners, “mostly they were short trips. Never more than a minute or two, normally. Checking they were still standing, was my take on it. But there was one place he stopped for longer, the couple of times I seen him go in there. And by longer I mean overnight. Little place in Clapham - nice enough, but nothing special from where I was standing. Unless you count the woman kissing him hello on the doorstep or the two little girls who were hugging him and calling him Daddy.”

  “Rose and her sister,” said El slowly, processing the information.

  “Got it in one,” said Ruby.

  “A second family, a second home,” said Sita. “It was the obvious place for him to hide the things he didn’t want to be found - and the one place neither Saul nor Elizabeth could ever know about.”

  “So obviously,” said Ruby, “it was the one place we knew we had to be.”

  ———

  They decided on a two-pronged attack, with any profits split between them, 50/50.

  Madam Chandravali would continue her visits to the Marchant home, ferreting out whatever nuggets of information she could from Elizabeth, Saul and the family cook – a cheerful and pleasantly talkative woman with whom she was cultivating the beginnings of a friendship.

  Ruby, meanwhile, would find a way to insinuate herself into the second Marchant house - ideally in such a guise as to allow her easy access to its secrets and, eventually, to the bank passcodes that Sita was sure she’d find there.

  As a cleaner, perhaps. Or a housekeeper.

  ———

  “I was expecting getting in to be more of a challenge, to be quite honest with you,” said Ruby. “As it was, I barely had to break a sweat. She was a stroppy one, the mistress - Rose’s Mum. And a drinker. But she was a snob, too. Thought she deserved better than what she’d got - you know the sort. Women like that don’t need much of a nudge to start believing they ought to have servants.”

  “What did you do?” asked El.

  “Bumped into her down the Co-op,” said Ruby. “And I mean literally bumped into her - sent her shopping flying. Baked beans and Golden Wonder bloody everywhere. By the time I’d picked everything up and helped her carry it home, good citizen that I am, she’d given me her life story - all except the shacking up with a married man, obviously. She told me he was a salesman, something high up in insurance - that he made a lot of money, but wasn’t home much.”

  “Now, I’d love to tell you it was my gift of the gab that got it out of her, but I’m pretty sure from the smell coming off her she was already half-cut by then, even if it had just gone lunchtime. And I didn’t get the sense she had a lot of people round her willing to just… listen to her.”

  “I said how hard it had to be for her, raising two girls practically on her own with no-one to help her with the cooking and cleaning and clearing up after them, and she said it was - that she’d do anything for a bit of time to herself now and then.”

  “So I said to her: this bloke of yours. He might not have much time to give you, but if he’s got as much money as you say he has, why don’t you get him to spend some of it on a domestic? You know - someone to help you out a bit in the evenings and get the tea ready for the kids when they come home from school?”

  “She thought it was a bloody brilliant idea, didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. Asked me if I knew anyone who fit the bill.”

  “Which was Auntie Ruby’s cue, of course,” said Sita, “to tell her that, as luck would have it, she had some experience herself in domestic work - and happened, by a further stroke of good fortune, to have very recently vacated her last position…”

  ———

  It was undemanding work, especially for a woman with two young boys of her own who knew her way around a chip-pan. She did four days a week at the Clapham house, cleaning and tidying in the mornings and cooking dinner for the family in the afternoons. She went by the name Martha, because it tickled her, and hoped Marchant’s mistress was no more of a Bible scholar than she looked.

  The mistress was a nightmare, vacillating like a lot of drunks Ruby had known between ostentatious displays of gratitude for Ruby’s help and unpredictable flares of temper, also directed Ruby’s way - one often following so closely behind the other that a single afternoon might reasonably accommodate both a heartfelt proclamation of affection and an accusation of stealing sixpence from the dresser.

  The girls, though, were a delight - thoughtful and intelligent and sensitive, the younger girl more playful where the older one was more earnest. Ruby liked both of them enormously; wished more and better for them than the hand they’d been dealt, in spite of the private schools and pony lessons bankrolled by their largely absent father.

  From Marchant himself she kept her distance, keeping her head down and her back to him on the rare occasions he’d come to stay - in part as a protective measure, to keep herself from being identified in the future, and in part because, whatever she might say, she trusted her own instincts every bit as much as Sita, and her instincts were telling her loud and clear that he was a man she’d do well to avoid.

  Of the promised bank codes, to her frustration, she found nothing.

  ———

  “I was a month or so into the job when it happened,” she told El. “He was meant to be round that night, having dinner with the kids, so I plated up the food for the four of them and made myself scarce.”

  ———

  She hadn’t planned to follow Marchant anywhere that evening - assuming, as was typically the case when he visited his second family, that he’d be staying the night.

  She’d skulked around the overgrown garden, very briefly, after her shift ended, while he and the kids were eating - poking her nose into the tool shed near the rusty gate at the bottom, just in case she’d missed anything the third or fourth time she’d been in to investigate. Then she’d made her way back up, through the tall grass, and tiptoed quietly through the alleyway that ran alongside the house and spilled her back out onto the street
by the front door.

  There were raised voices, his and the mistress’s, drifting out through the open kitchen window as she passed, but she hadn’t thought much of it - the mistress had been hammering the Blue Nun all day, getting more and more belligerent with every glass, and Marchant had a short fuse himself, so a slanging match had seemed to her the inevitable consequence of throwing the two of them together in a confined space for any length of time. She couldn’t catch many of the words, but the gist of it was clear enough: she wanted him to leave his wife, and he never would.

  I shouldn’t push your luck, love, she’d thought.

  She’d parked the Aston Martin three doors down and across the road from the house - assuming (so far accurately) that neither the mistress nor loverboy would believe that a woman like her could ever own a car like that, even if they saw her approaching it with the keys in her hand. She had the lights on and the engine running already when she realised her glasses weren’t where they should have been - that she must have left them inside, neglected to put them back in her handbag after she’d taken them off to clean.

  She didn’t need them to drive - they were sunglasses, purely decorative - but she didn’t fancy leaving them behind, either: they were Oliver Goldsmith, Manhattans, and exactly the sort of thing she could imagine the mistress pocketing if she saw them lying around unattended. She’d likely think they were knock-offs, that Ruby had picked them up down the market rather than direct from the Goldsmith family in Poland Street, but that hardly mattered - real or fake, they’d still be gone.

  She had the driving side door half opened and was running through excuses to get herself back in the house and up to the bathroom when Marchant emerged outside - looking shiftily from left to right, like a caricature of a burglar, then striding briskly over to his MG and disappearing inside.

  Interesting, she’d thought - the Manhattans suddenly forgotten. He’d never left before, not even after a row.

  She ducked down into her seat; waited until he’d pulled out onto the road and then followed him in the Aston as he drove away.

  ———

  “I was expecting him to head off home,” said Ruby. “Back to Liz and Elgin Crescent. But he didn’t. He didn’t go far at all.”

  ———

  He stopped the MG outside a corner shop in Stockwell. She watched him go inside; kept her binoculars, an army-issue pair Winston had brought back from Italy after the war, trained on him through the shop window as he exchanged a handful of coins for a box of safety matches, two heavy broadsheets and a can of lighter fluid, square and bulky.

  He was wearing gloves now, she noticed. Leather gloves and a soft brown homburg, the wide brim pulled low over his face.

  Head down and shoulders hunched forward, he darted out of the shop and back into his car - weaving the MG in and out of what felt to Ruby like every backstreet in South London and avoiding all the major arteries.

  By the time he pulled back up onto the pavement around the back of his mistress’s house - and conspicuously not in front of it - Ruby’s instincts were baying for attention. When he slipped a key out of his pocket, let himself in without knocking and closed the door very gently behind him, they were screaming.

  ———

  “I must have known what he was doing, even before I saw the smoke starting to trickle out the back,” Ruby said, her eyes clouding over with the effort of the telling. “They were all gas fireplaces in them houses, hers included. There was nothing there you’d need setting alight.”

  “I couldn’t go inside while he was there - I knew that and all. I was starting to get a sense of what kind of character we were dealing with, and I think now the same as I thought back then: if he’d caught sight of me inside and thought I might’ve been able to finger him for the job… he’d have killed me, there and then. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  “So I waited, God forgive me. Waited to go in ’til he was out the house and he’d let himself out the back gate. ‘Cause I didn’t know, then. Didn’t know it was that bedroom he’d chose to start the fire. Didn’t know the little one had crawled in for a cuddle while her Mum was passed out cold in bed. Didn’t know…”

  She stopped talking, abruptly, and closed her eyes. She wasn’t crying - El had never known her to cry - but her hands were shaking, and she was biting her lip to hold herself together.

  You got Rose out, El wanted to tell her, for all the comfort it would have given. You got one of them, even if you couldn’t get to the other. At least one of those kids is alive because of what you did.

  As suddenly as they’d closed, Ruby’s eyes sprang open, looking straight at El.

  “When I tell you that man is dangerous and you need to be watching yourself every second you’re around him,” she said, “I need you to listen to me. Really bleedin’ listen. Because I might not’ve known that little girl was in there, but he did. He must’ve done. And he set that fire anyway. Set the fire and ran away out that house and back to his wife.”

  “And I never told Rose this, because she don’t need to have it in her head after what she’s seen, but I’m telling you now: he didn’t just shut them in that room. That weren’t enough for him. No, he locked the door. Locked the door, locked the pair of them in there, and left his own little girl screaming for her Daddy to come and help her while she were burning to death.”

  Chapter 24

  Earl’s Court

  1996

  “Tell me about your family,” Alison Miller began.

  “My family?” Marchant asked - warily, as if she’d enquired into his medical records or the state of his personal finances.

  “Your wife. Your children. Grandchildren, if you have any.”

  He took a chunk of bread from the basket and dipped it with surprising daintiness into the little plate of oil and vinegar beside his water glass. His head didn’t turn, she noticed - nothing so overt - but his eyes flickered momentarily around the restaurant before he chose to respond; took in the rows of unoccupied tables, the absence of hovering, keen-eared waiting staff.

  “What about them?” he said.

  “I’d like us to make better use of them during the campaign. Raise their profiles.”

  He spluttered, sending wet pellets of half-chewed sourdough in her direction.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  El tucked a strand of lacquered hair behind her ear and adjusted the new, thicker frames of Alison Miller’s glasses - conscious of their bulk, and specifically of the pinhole camera embedded in the join between the lenses, where the plastic and titanium met the bridge of her nose.

  It was completely secure, Karen had assured her; entirely invisible to the naked eye of the observer. But El was lo-fi - a pen-and-paper planner, analogue in her approach to the job, and Karen’s reliance on technology made her uneasy. Other people were variables enough; adding hardware and its potential to malfunction into the mix felt like asking for trouble.

  “They’re a clear differentiator for voters,” she told him, with the calm reserve that was swiftly becoming her fallback in dealing with his objections. “Seymour Henderson is a documented adulterer - a pervert and a whoremonger. You, conversely, are a family man with no known peccadillos and a marriage that’s lasted for decades. It’s an obvious strength, and we ought to be playing to it. Which means bringing your wife, and ideally the whole family into the spotlight.”

  He hesitated. She wondered whether, had she known nothing at all about him, she would have been so cognisant of the cost/benefit analysis he seemed to be performing before he replied: the publicity use-value of a well-put-together spouse and clean-cut offspring versus the potential risk presented by inviting press and public interest into his private circumstances. Not to mention the provocative red flag that a publicly-paraded marriage might represent to surviving mistresses and second families, past and present.

  “I don’t doubt it would play well to the cheap seats,” he said. “But you’d have a hard time persuading Elizabeth. She
doesn’t care for attention, never has.”

  El considered Elizabeth Marchant as Sita had described her: the bad taste, the naivety that bordered on the gullible, the longing to have someone listen to her so great that she was willing to pay for human company. Had she ever been offered much attention, or at least much attention from her husband, over the course of a marriage that had lasted almost all her adult life?

  “And the children?” she asked.

  The combined background information Rose and Ruby had gathered on Oscar and James Junior had been substantial, and pointed to Oscar, the eldest - settled, solvent and the logical heir to the Marchant empire - as the most attractive candidate to dangle in front of the media. James Junior was dissolute by comparison - a playboy, a gambler and a celebrity hanger-on with no obvious enthusiasm for the family business beyond its capacity to bankroll his competing interests in cocaine and handmade Italian loafers.

  Though El had met the youngest, Harriet, in person at Marchant’s office, it was Harriet she felt she knew the least. What background they had on her was infinitely more sparse, factual but light on detail - which meant, El guessed, that neither Ruby’s contact network nor Rose’s investigators had succeeded in prising any illuminating personal anecdotes from those that knew her. From her university and work records they knew she was an academic, a social psychologist with a focus on norms and behavioural decision theory who taught part time at King’s; they knew she was unmarried, had no children and had lived alone for the last few years in an unexpectedly modest one-bed rental above a charity shop on the Holloway Road. To satisfy her own curiosity, El had sought out one of her most recent journal articles, on antisocial personality characteristics and game theory, and had enjoyed it, though the central speculation - that sociopathy could serve as a useful indicator of rational decision-making - had raised questions for El about what might have led Harriet to settle on that topic, that hypothesis.