The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “I have a private security team,” he said. “My own, not the company’s. They’re… experienced. And discreet.”

  “And they’re intelligent men? Strategically-minded? This isn’t a job for blunt instruments, however well you may be able rely on them to keep their mouths shut. Ms D’Amboise is a journalist - or was, before she took her leave of absence. She’ll know how to protect her sources, and she’ll know if she’s being followed. It won’t be enough to stage a bungled break-in or a hit and run. Whichever resource you deploy to extract the requisite information from her and then remove her from the equation… they’ll need to be able to think as well as do, and think quickly. To adapt.”

  This was a gamble, maybe their biggest. If Rose was right and he’d yet to find a head of security to replace Ricky Lomax, a new right-hand man, then he didn’t have the resource to carry out the kind of hit she was proposing. He’d have to go looking for it.

  His brows creased; he was coming, she suspected, to the same realisation.

  “Shit,” he said, as much to himself as to El.

  Rose was right, then, El thought - impressed again by how well she’d calculated the setup and the players involved, how meticulously she’d structured the con.

  She took a second, slow drink of her water, making him wait.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” she said.

  He bristled. It was beginning to needle him, she thought: both the calmness of her delivery and the way she’d taken the upper hand, made him unexpectedly subordinate. To get under his skin.

  “I can deal with it,” he said, so abruptly it was nearly a snarl.

  She let out a sigh, and reached down into her attaché case for a pen. On the thick white cloth of her napkin she jotted a line of digits; folded it in half, and held it out to Marchant.

  He fixed her with the same, faintly worried stare as before - the one that said he knew he’d misjudged her, that perhaps he hadn’t quite known what he was buying when he engaged her services. And then he took it.

  “Call this number,” she said. “The man who answers will ask for a name. Give him mine, and he may be willing to help you. If he is, tell him to bill me directly. I’ll add the cost to my final invoice.”

  Now she was sure she’d wrong-footed him; he looked stunned, utterly lost for words.

  “He’s reliable, he’s efficient and he can think on his feet,” she said, when he failed to speak. “If you must bring in additional support, and it sounds like you must, then given the delicacy of the situation I’d much rather that support be delivered by someone I’m confident can actually do the job.”

  He unfolded the napkin; studied the number, then refolded it and put it carefully into his jacket pocket.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re really not at all what I expected.”

  He was still irritated, she was sure; still resentful of her power over him. But there was something else there too now in the way he looked at her - something like admiration, and something like affinity. He thinks he knows me, she thought - or rather, knows Alison Miller. He understands her. He thinks she’s just like him.

  “Call the number,” she repeated. “Neither of us can afford for you to wait.”

  Chapter 25

  Herne Hill

  1996

  The air in the car was foggy with smoke; clouds of it so dense El felt her eyes stinging in sympathy.

  “I wish he’d put that fucking fag out,” Karen said, twiddling the resolution button on the projector remote. “It’s misting up the lens.”

  Like the video feed broadcast from Seymour Henderson’s flat by way of Karen’s corset, this one was live - beamed direct to the basement room at Ledbury Road from a white Audi parked in a quiet cul-de-sac off Coldharbour Lane. The camera in this case was anchored to the wraparound sunglasses worn by the man in the driving seat. The glasses were dark and unremarkable, like everything else about the man: his plain t-shirt and jeans, his manicured hands, his shaved head and neatly-trimmed beard. His appearance was a case-study in anonymity, in social camouflage; once seen, El thought, he’d be immediately forgotten. His sole concession to style was the piercing: an obsidian stud, half the size of a penny but twice as thick, apparently driven into the cartilage of his right ear.

  “Can he hear us?” Rose asked.

  “I fitted that earpiece myself,” said Karen, insulted. “Course he can hear us. Can’t you, you lazy twat?”

  The man in the Audi twitched.

  “You don’t have to speak to me like that,” he said, in a soft voice that had, El thought, more than a touch of a whine to it. “I’m doing my best here.”

  “Do better,” Karen told him. “And open a window while you’re at it. It looks like a fucking hotbox in there.”

  The man grumbled something inaudible, but opened the door to the Audi a crack, clearing some of the smoke and affording all of them a sharper view of the grey pavement slabs and low-rise council flats outside. Then closed it again, sharply.

  “He’s coming,” he whispered.

  The camera swung left, to the empty seat next to him. The unlocked passenger door sprung open, and a second man slipped into the car, long legs first: Marchant, in a navy puffer jacket and an oversized baseball cap that were more casual than anything El had seen him wear before.

  “Are you Tony?” Marchant asked, without preamble.

  “Depends,” the other man replied, sounding cooler and more intimidating than he had previously. “Are you Jim?”

  Marchant nodded in the affirmative.

  “You recording this?” the man asked him.

  Marchant shook his head.

  “Prove it,” said the man. “Unzip that coat.”

  Marchant grimaced, appalled by the demand, but complied.

  “The shirt too,” the man added.

  This time Marchant hesitated; parted his lips to object.

  “Open the shirt, or get out of the car,” the man said. “I ain’t telling you twice.”

  Marchant wrinkled his nose, in anger or disgust, but reached for his top button.

  “What now?” he asked testily, when the greying hairs and pink-white flesh of his chest were exposed.

  “Now we talk,” said the man. “And you tell me what problem it is you want me to solve for you.”

  ———

  The boy El had met in Rose’s kitchen a month before had looked markedly different from the man in the Audi.

  In his designer jeans and basketball shoes, with a head of short dreadlocks and no hair at all to speak of on his cheeks or chin, she’d taken him for a teenager; 15 or 16 at most. Only when Karen had introduced him as her brother had she done the maths - realised that, if his mother had been pregnant with him when his father disappeared, then he must have been at least 20, maybe older.

  He’d stood up politely as El entered the room; even shaken her hand.

  “I thought young people were meant to be rude these days?” she’d said, smiling at him.

  “Reckons he’s smooth, don’t you, Theo?” Karen said. “A real ladies’s man.”

  “At least some of us still have manners,” Theo replied, returning El’s smile.

  “Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree with this one,” Karen told him, gesturing to El. “So sit your arse back down before you embarrass yourself any more than you have already.”

  If Karen hadn’t told El they were siblings, the conversation that had followed would have made it abundantly clear - their bickering reminding her in no small way of Ruby and Sita’s.

  “Theo’s a musician,” Karen told her. “A drummer.”

  “In a band?” El had asked - conjuring mental images of the boy in front of her sweating shirtless over a drum kit behind guitar bands in Camden, neo-soul singers in Hoxton, 12-piece reggae collectives in Brixton.

  “The Royal Philharmonic,” Theo said. “I’m a percussionist.”

  “But basically a drummer,” Karen added.

  He was straight, she told them later; h
ad never had so much as a parking ticket, let alone been arrested, unless you counted the occasional stop-and-search by police who’d seen him hanging around too long outside Southwark Cathedral or the Albert Hall. But he was also Leon Baxter’s son, a son who’d been brought up on stories of the father who’d never got to meet him - so when Karen told him about the job and asked him if he’d help them pull it off, he was always going to say yes.

  “But can you do it?” Rose had asked him, acknowledging the elephant in the room. “I don’t intend this as a criticism, but I don’t know that I’ve ever met a more unlikely assassin.”

  Theo considered this.

  “Can I do it?” he asked, mulling each word as if putting the question to himself. “Hmm… can I do it? Let’s see…”

  He drummed his fingers on the table, then looked at Rose and grinned.

  It was like magic, El thought; like a spell he’d cast on himself. He seemed to physically change in front of them at will, to age and grow; his posture stiffening, his slim frame widening at the shoulders, the cast of his face toughening until he wasn’t a boy anymore but a man - and a hard man at that, the kind who’d pull a blade on you in the pub if you took his stool at the bar or looked at him the wrong way. As transformations went, it was nigh on perfect. She wasn’t sure Ruby or Sita could have done better - or, for that matter, that she could have done better herself.

  “You know what?” he said, in a cold, rough voice that wasn’t his own. “I reckon I can.”

  Neither she nor Rose spoke.

  “Yeah, alright,” said Karen, grudgingly. “They’ve seen you do it; you can stop now.”

  Theo clicked his fingers theatrically, and his expression changed again, back to its original look of teenage bemusement.

  “Little fucker went to Sylvia Young before he got into Guildhall,” Karen added. “Thinks he’s one of the kids from Fame.”

  ———

  “You bring what I asked?” said Theo.

  Marchant, his shirt now re-buttoned, shoved a hand into the recesses of his jacket and retrieved a thin envelope. He passed it to Theo in silence.

  Theo opened it; examined the contents, a single piece of paper on which a name and address were written in finely-drawn uppercase. A passport-sized photo of Hannah’s face and upper body was stapled to the corner of the page.

  “There’s only one name here,” he said. “You said on the phone there were two.”

  “There are,” said Marchant. “But the second one is… an unknown quantity.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Marchant sucked in a breath - feeling uncomfortable, El suspected, about having to articulate his requirements so bluntly, after so many years of issuing elliptical orders to lieutenants and having them obeyed.

  “I don’t know his name, or where you’ll find him,” he said. He tapped Hannah’s photo with one finger. “But she does. I’ll need you to deal with them both.”

  “You want me to get it out of her before I do her, is that it?” said Theo.

  This time, Marchant’s breathing was so loud it sent a crackle of feedback through the video output. Definitely uncomfortable, El thought. He hates that he’s going to have to say it aloud.

  “Alison told me you were able to handle that sort of thing,” he said.

  “I am. But it’ll cost her. Cost her extra.”

  “Money isn’t an issue. Just get it done.”

  Theo reached over to the glove compartment, his arm brushing Marchant’s en route. Marchant flinched, and Theo let out a snigger that came out closer to a growl.

  “Calm down,” he said, making no effort to conceal his amusement at the old man’s alarm. “Nobody’s paying me to take you out.”

  He opened the glove box, placed the slip of paper inside and pushed it closed again, still smiling.

  El felt herself smile, and realised - slightly belatedly - that Theo, or whichever TV gangster he was imitating, wasn’t the only one enjoying Marchant’s discomfiture; that she was finding her own pleasure in his fear. She wondered if Rose and Karen felt the same.

  “When?” Marchant asked, when he’d recovered himself.

  “Soon,” said Theo. “Tomorrow or the day after.”

  “How will I know when it’s done?”

  “You want proof? Photos?”

  “God, no! Just… confirmation.”

  “Your boss’ll get my bill, that’s how you’ll know. Same as always.”

  Even through his fear, Marchant bridled at the suggestion.

  “She’s not my boss,” he said. “She works for me.”

  “Whatever,” said Theo, his interest in Marchant apparently waning. “We done here?”

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “I’d’ve said if I didn’t.”

  “Then I suppose we are.”

  “Good,” Theo said. He pulled out a lighter, a heavy gold brick that could have been raided from the Romanovs, and lit another of his cigarettes, blowing the smoke in Marchant’s face. “Out you get, then,” he told him. “I got work to do.”

  ———

  “Do you have what you need?” Rose asked Karen, when Marchant had exited the Audi and Theo had, with a sigh of relief he didn’t bother to disguise, pulled the sunglasses from his face and the pseudo-piercing from his ear.

  “More than,” said Karen, turning off the projector. “What with this and what we’d got before, we should have a proper sizzle reel ready once I’ve stitched it all together in the edit.”

  Karen’s studio workspace-cum-editing suite, location undisclosed, had become the stuff of legend at Ledbury Road. El imagined something like a Batcave: an underground fortress bathed in blue phosphorescence, stacked floor to ceiling with complex technologies of unspecified purpose and accessible only through a network of secret tunnels.

  “We’re on the clock with the video,” El reminded her. “You okay with that?”

  “It’ll be ready for Friday,” Karen said. “Sooner, if I can swing it. I’m pretty fucking motivated, believe me.”

  She packed up and left them to it, hauling her canvas bag of cables and hardware out of the house and off, El presumed, to the Batcave to get started.

  El had expected Rose to leave too, to retreat upstairs to the living room and put in a call to her sister-in-law in Sussex - checking in on Sophie before bedtime, the way she had every night since she’d sent her away.

  Instead, she ambled over to the old drinks cabinet behind the sofa; grabbed a nearly-full bottle of Malibu and two glasses, and put both on the side table next to her armchair.

  “The cupboard isn’t very well stocked down here, I’m afraid,” she said apologetically. “I have to take what I can get.”

  She filled both glasses; passed one to El, and kept the other for herself.

  “Camilla’s taken Sophie out this evening,” she said, before El could ask. “Bowling, I believe.”

  She leaned back against the armchair’s headrest, stretched out her legs and rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, exposing the scarred skin of her forearm. She was more relaxed about showing it since their conversation at the hospital, El had noticed; less concerned, maybe, that seeing it would prompt questions she didn’t want to answer.

  “Sounds fun,” El replied absently. Then: “Do you think we’re ready?”

  “I think we’ve done as much as we can,” said Rose, taking a drink and wincing as it hit her throat.

  El wanted, suddenly, to make an apology of her own: to explain that she didn’t normally get nervous on the job, or look for eleventh hour reassurance, but this one was different, personal. And then realised that she didn’t have to - that Rose almost certainly knew already, and very likely felt the same. It was personal for all of them; every one of them needed the payoff as badly as she did, whatever that payoff might bring. Relief, she hoped; some respite from the memories of her mother, reconstructed and imagined, that had plagued her more and more since the day Ruby had sent her off to Highgate to look at a pa
inting. The blood debt, paid.

  “Do you think you’ll feel better, after?” she asked Rose.

  “No,” Rose said - and if El had expected an honest answer, then it wasn’t that. “This, what we’re doing - it isn’t restitution. It’s reparation.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “I believe so. There’s no bringing them back, is there? Not my sister, not your mother - not any of them. No restoration, no justice to be had - not in any conventional sense. And peace of mind seems too much to hope for.”

  “Then why do it?”

  Rose seemed to hesitate before answering, for so long that El wondered if she was going to answer at all.

  “Because it needs to be done,” she said finally, small and exhausted - not a warrior on the brink of battle but a just-widowed wife, making sandwiches for the guests the night before a wake. Because it needs to be done.

  El reached across the side-table and took her hand.

  “It will be,” she said.

  Chapter 26

  Silvertown

  1996

  On Alison Miller’s advice, Marchant had opted for a modest venue for the campaign lunch: the function room of the Custom House Irish Centre, an echoing church hall-like affair better used to hosting ceilidhs, children’s dance classes and live broadcasts of the Six Nations Championship.

  There was no stage, but the raised wooden platform at one end of the room had been kitted out with a long rectangular table complete with a microphone and a carafe of water, and a pull-down home cinema screen had been fixed to the wall behind. An arrangement of stackable plastic chairs, five seats wide and five deep, faced the table. On the chairs sat twenty or so journalists, handpicked for their known sympathies for mavericks and independents; at the table sat Marchant, flanked by his eldest son and the most loyal and long serving of his PAs. El herself was in the press pit, in the centre of the front row - a position that afforded her the closest possible view of Marchant’s face.