The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  He wore what El - what Alison - had advised him to wear: a charcoal suit cut in a 1940s style with a maroon tie, pocket square and patent leather Oxfords. It was a look, she’d told him, that spoke subtly of wartime leadership, of Blitz spirit and Churchillian integrity. He also wore a lapel pin, large enough to fall just the wrong side of subtle. The pin was handmade, polished silver and shaped into a pair of perfectly-balanced Themis scales. If all went well, she’d told him, the scales would become the campaign’s trademark - a symbol of his commitment to fairness, justice, transparency and good counsel.

  He looked confident, she thought. And that was good. She wanted him confident; unprepared.

  Oscar Marchant spoke first, leaning into the microphone with the robust self-assurance of a university debate captain.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman,” he said. “And thank you so much for joining us. I realise this may be a little different from some of your standard briefing haunts.”

  This elicited a hoot of condescending laughter from the assembled press.

  “As you’re all aware,” he continued, “we have a by-election approaching here in Silvertown. I don’t think I need to tell you why.”

  Another burst of laughter, this time at Seymour Henderson’s expense.

  “The Tories, of course, will put forward one of their own to fill the vacated seat - though it’s fair to say their last pick has given us some cause to question their vetting procedures. Labour and the Lib Dems will likely also be fielding candidates, as they should.”

  “We’re here today, though, to ask you and the people of Silvertown a very important question, which is this: do we want to carry on with business as usual in this constituency? Are we really happy with the same parade of faces, the same rehashed promises? Or do we deserve something different - something better?”

  It was a fine speech, she thought with a twinge of pride - the lines she’d written fortified by the measured hammer-blow of his delivery. No matter that neither Marchant had ever had cause to set foot in the borough before now; no matter that neither could have cared less what the people of Silvertown did or didn’t want. The words had power.

  “I believe we do,” he said. “I invite you, therefore, to cast your eyes over the brief video presentation we’ve prepared for you, and to join me thereafter in welcoming the newest independent candidate for Silvertown - my father, Mr James Marchant.”

  There was a brief round of clapping from the audience. Marchant Senior beamed, and returned the applause with a small, bashful wave.

  Oscar Marchant nodded to a colleague at the back of the room. The lights dimmed; behind the table, the screen lit up, and the video El had carefully loaded into the projector began to play.

  She held her breath, and waited.

  ———

  What Karen had made, in her hidden lair with her unknown technologies, had exceeded their expectations.

  It ran to barely 10 minutes, but every frame justified its presence - the disparate bits of footage she’d collected knitted together into a damning, cohesive whole.

  It opened with an introduction from Ricky Lomax, explaining briefly to the camera how long he’d worked for Marchant, and what his duties had comprised - then cut to a heavily edited description of the backroom abortion he’d witnessed in Perivale, his murder of the abortion doctor and the way he’d disposed, on Marchant’s instructions, of the remains not only of him, but of the girl who’d bled to death on her own mattress.

  From there it segued to a digitised series of newspaper headlines from the late ‘70s, sequentially documenting the discovery of El’s mother’s body, the Leicestershire Constabulary’s arrest of their prime suspect and, finally, George Young’s conviction at the Old Bailey. The news stories were accompanied by a voice-over offering an alternative take on the official record: Lomax’s gravelly, emotionless recounting of what he’d found in Marchant’s hotel room, the state of the body, the suitcase he’d used to transport it to the graveyard where he’d left her.

  “‘Can you take care of it?’, that was all he asked me,” Lomax said as last headline faded. “But he didn’t need to say no more. I knew what he meant.”

  The next scene was more recent, showing Marchant at the table he’d shared with El in the restaurant in Earl’s Court the week before - carefully cut to keep Hannah’s face out of shot, even as she laid out the charges before him. Here again Karen had layered on headlines and front page news items - these ones detailing the house fire killings in Greenwich, the arson with no obvious suspects.

  Finally, there was Marchant in the passenger seat of the Audi, passing an unseen Theo a sheet of paper - the name and address on it obscured and the photo attached blurred to a series of unrecognisable pixels.

  “I’ll need you to deal with them both,” he said - the sound quality enhanced, the order and the implication loud and clear.

  The film closed with a title card, white letters on a plain black background: Vote James Marchant - The Honest Choice For Silvertown.

  “He may run, afterwards,” Rose had told El, the day she’d outlined the plan she’d had in mind. “Or he may stay and brazen it out. It doesn’t matter. Once the press see it, it will be less than a day before every local and national newspaper in the country is baying for his blood. Less than a few hours, possibly. And at least one of the journalists in that room will pass what they’ve seen and heard along to the police, even before the video itself reaches their newsdesks. He may be well connected, and he may have influence over the upper echelons of the Met - but whatever connections he has are apt to crumble in the face of this kind of evidence going public. None of his friends will be able to protect him, if they have any interest in keeping their pensions.”

  “And what about me?” El had asked. “What do I do, when all this is happening?”

  “You leave,” Rose had said. “As quietly and discreetly as you can. While the video is still playing, would be my advice.”

  ———

  Something was off. She knew it within seconds of the film beginning; before she was able to process what she was seeing.

  It was a different video, up on the screen; the wrong video.

  Instead of Lomax and the headlines, there was a family - a woman, a man, a small child riding piggyback on his shoulders and a medium-sized spaniel on a lead, the four of them walking together contently through sunlit parkland.

  “I’ve lived in Silvertown all my life,” said the woman, directly to the camera, “and I’ve seen at least three MPs come and go. They were from different parties, but they all had one thing in common: I didn’t believe a word they said.”

  “We’re ready for a change,” the man chipped in, his happy pink face filling the screen.

  It was an advert, El realised; the American-style campaign ad she’d promised Marchant, the one that would never be allowed on TV or the radio but that could easily do the rounds at meet-and-greet sessions and parish hall stump speeches.

  And if it was playing now, that meant that someone had switched the film reel on the projector - exchanging hers for their own.

  Which meant, logically, that someone had known in advance what hers had contained.

  She lowered her gaze, momentarily, to Marchant; expecting to see his head turned towards the video, to see him basking in the glow of its reflected glory.

  He wasn’t.

  He was watching her. Looking down at her, and smiling.

  He knows, she thought. I don’t know how, but he knows.

  I need to get out. Get out now.

  She pushed back her chair and ran for the exit, as fast as Alison Miller’s feet would carry her.

  Chapter 27

  Newham

  1996

  She sprinted to Custom House Station, and from there hopped the DLR to Canning Town, looking over her shoulder the whole journey.

  At Canning Town, she crossed the main road and strode with as much of an aura of entitlement as she could muster into a mid-range chain h
otel - one neither expensive enough to have invested overmuch in door security, nor so low-budget that the reception staff would be on the lookout for non-residents seeking shelter from the elements.

  Inside, she made for the disabled bathroom at the end of the lobby; locked the door, hung Alison Miller’s lime-green blazer on the coat hook welded to the tiled wall and, with ball after ball of damp paper towel, stripped the other woman’s heavy, pale foundation from her face, neck and hands. Skin scrubbed, she loosened the first three buttons of her white blouse and untucked it from her trousers, until she looked more like an off-duty barista than a middle-aged executive. She took her mobile phone and Alison Miller’s ID, credit card and the handful of cash in her bill holder from her attaché case and stuffed them into her trouser pockets. The case itself she shoved behind the toilet, out of sight.

  Then she sat down on the toilet lid, and let herself think.

  Marchant had known about the video; that much was certain. And if he’d known about the video, she reasoned, then he’d very likely also known about her - that she wasn’t who she’d said she was. That she wasn’t Alison Miller.

  In which case: did he know her real name - who she was, where she lived?

  Did he - and even the idea of it made her breath catch and her heart beat faster - know about the rest of them, about Rose and Ruby and the house at Ledbury Road? And if he did: did he know why it was that they’d come after him?

  What she didn’t ask herself, but would wish later that she had, was: how had he come to know any of it at all?

  She checked Alison Miller’s watch; saw that half an hour had passed since she’d left the Irish Centre.

  How far could he get, in half an hour? What kind of resources could he mobilise?

  Could he - or more likely, one of his security team - have made it to Ledbury Road already?

  She retrieved the mobile phone from her pocket and dialled Rose’s home phone number. There was no answer, although she let it ring for a solid minute.

  Which didn’t mean anything, she told herself. They were probably in the kitchen, waiting, all five of them, Rose and Ruby and Sita and Karen and Hannah. Would they even hear the phone from there, when it rang in the hallway?

  She dialled another number from memory: Karen’s. It didn’t ring at all; the phone, a message told her, had been switched off.

  She didn’t panic; didn’t let herself panic. Panic was paralysing - it wouldn’t get her anywhere.

  Leaving the blazer on the coat hook and the attaché case behind the toilet, she left first the bathroom, then the hotel.

  On the street outside she hailed a cab to Rose’s. They hit traffic at Blackfriars, a stretch of cars stacked bumper to bumper from the bridge at Victoria Embankment all the way to Charing Cross, and it was another hour before they made it to Westbourne Park. She stopped the cab at the tube station and walked the rest of the way to the house, taking Tavistock Road at a pace so brisk that a light sweat broke out on her back.

  She climbed the steps to the front door and rang the doorbell three times in succession, her heart pounding.

  Her relief, when Hannah opened the door, was overwhelming.

  “What happened?” Hannah said, alarmed.

  El tried to speak, and found she couldn’t. She pushed past Hannah, almost throwing herself into the hallway, and slammed the door behind her; locked and bolted it, and pulled the chain across. For all the good it would do them, if Marchant or his men came calling.

  “Is everyone okay?” she asked. She sounded wild, terrified, even to her own ears; entirely unlike herself.

  “They’re fine,” Hannah replied, now confused as well as concerned.

  “Where are they?”

  “In the kitchen. What...?”

  She ran down the hallway for the kitchen, leaving Hannah in her wake. If the rest of them were there, she could warn them; could get them out and somewhere safer, somewhere out of London. Maybe out of the country.

  She saw Ruby first, through the half-open kitchen door; the older woman leaning back against the counter, hands behind her and elbows bent, as if she were preparing herself to perform a triceps dip. Her eyes flashed to El when she saw her coming, but she didn’t acknowledge her; didn’t wave or bellow a greeting the way she usually would. Just blinked, twice, then looked away.

  Sita stood beside the counter, entirely still; her arms held stiffly in the air, palms-up. Her mouth was a tight, straight line; her face expressionless. She gave no indication of having seen El at all.

  El was through the door and in the kitchen before she could consider what either of these things might mean.

  Which was when she saw the others.

  Karen was on the sofa, her head bowed. Her hands were hidden; El thought she might have been sitting on them, her thighs flattening them down into the upholstery behind her. The muscles of her arms and legs were tensed, clenched so hard that the fabric of her shirt and cycling shorts seemed in danger of tearing. There was a patch of discolouration just visible on the side of her jaw; it might have been the beginnings of a bruise.

  And then there was Rose.

  She was standing, like Ruby and Sita, but she wasn’t still. Her feet paced the floor by the dining table, moving backwards and forwards and left and right in a tight square - the movements giving El the impression of an animal caught in an enclosure, an electrified fence penning it in on all sides. El thought, at first glance, that she was clutching at her wrists with her fingers - and then realised, with something like dread, that her hands were bound; held together with a length of dark red material, a thin scarf or a tie.

  It was seeing Rose that brought home to El what else she was seeing: that the women in the kitchen were prisoners. Hostages.

  She spun around towards the door, preparing to fight or flee or both.

  And saw Marchant, stepping forward into the room from behind the door that had hidden him - a smile on his face and a gun in his hand.

  It wasn’t much of a gun; that was El’s first thought. She had no direct experience of firearms, but if she’d ever had cause to give consideration to her own mental model of gun as a concept, she’d likely have cited a few basic level attributes: black casing, a rough rectangular grip, a straight blunt muzzle and a cartridge chamber. Marchant’s had none of these; had the appearance, rather, of an old-fashioned revolver, its wooden handle and long silver barrel connoting Spaghetti Westerns and Golden Age detective fiction. Visually at least, it was unimpressive.

  It’d kill you all the same, though, wouldn’t it? said Ruby’s voice in her head.

  El listened to the voice, and backed away from Marchant and the gun - further into the kitchen, closer to the others.

  “El!” he said warmly. “So good to meet you at last. Meet you properly, I should say.”

  ———

  She stared - at him, at the gun, at the other women. It was all she could do.

  “Don’t tell him nothing,” snarled Ruby. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

  “I’ll say it again, Martha,” Marchant said, swivelling towards her and aiming the gun in her direction as he turned, “I don’t need any of you to tell me anything. That’s not why I came.”

  “Then why don’t you stop fucking talking?” said Karen, rising up from the sofa. El saw the cut on her lip as she raised her head; she’d been hit or punched, hard enough to draw blood.

  “Stay where you are, Miss Baxter,” Marchant told her, “or it won’t be a slap next time. I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”

  But he kept his eyes on Ruby as he spoke, El noticed - almost as if he considered her the greater threat of the two, despite Karen’s age, her obviously greater physical capacity. She wondered what had happened in the house before she’d arrived; what Ruby had said or done to him to warrant the reaction.

  Which led her, inexorably, to another question.

  “How are you here?” she asked Marchant. “How did you get in?”

  “I should ask her, if I were you
,” said Ruby, pointing a finger past Marchant; towards the hallway beyond.

  Between the kitchen and the hall, framed by the solid timber of the door, was Hannah.

  “I’m afraid I let him in,” she said.

  ———

  It was another transformation.

  The Hannah El had worked with - had virtually lived with - in the preceding months had been fragile, vulnerable; a sad porcelain doll of a woman. Elegant but, you could well imagine, easily shattered.

  This Hannah was stronger and taller, her demeanour more arrogant than forlorn. There was a cruel quirk to her lips now; a suggestion of amusement taken in the suffering of others, of a joke made at someone else’s expense. And something else, too - an echo of another face, another bearing, one that El knew better.

  “You let him in,” she repeated.

  “How could I not, when he knocked so politely?” Hannah said, and there was amusement in her voice, too.

  She’s laughing at me, El thought; at all of us.

  “You sold us out,” she said, because it was the only thing that made sense, the only rational explanation for what she was seeing and hearing. “You sold us out to him.”

  Hannah looked to Marchant, and they exchanged smiles - genuine smiles, laced with mutual affection.

  “Guilty as charged,” she said, still smiling.

  What did he give her? El thought. What could he possibly have offered her, to get her on side? To get her to like him - and like him enough to throw us to the wolves?

  “Whatever you’re asking yourself,” said Ruby, who knew what she was thinking - who’d always known what she was thinking, “it ain’t the right question, believe me.”

  “Honestly, Ruby,” Hannah said. “You can hardly expect her to guess.”

  To guess what? El thought. What the fuck is going on here? What am I missing?