The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “She’s family,” said Rose, revolted. “His daughter.”

  “And your sister,” Hannah told her, beaming. “Isn’t that hilarious?”

  Chapter 28

  Holland Park

  1994

  Lines. Two blue lines, intersecting - a little Nordic cross against a grey plastic background.

  Pregnant.

  Hannah blinked; loosened her grip on the test and shook it, up and down and side to side, then looked again.

  Pregnant.

  The thought frightened and repulsed her every bit as much as she knew it would delight Justin. It was almost unbearable. Not only the pregnancy itself, the 9 months of harbouring the parasitic seed of that milquetoast in her body - although that part alone was horror enough. But the aftermath: the next 18 years or more of parents’s evenings and homework and July fortnight holidays to Disneyworld and Mallorca with the parasite in tow, Justin fawning and simpering every step of the way.

  She couldn’t let it happen.

  She rang the clinic that afternoon and booked an appointment for the following week. It was still early, she told herself; she couldn’t be more than 8 weeks along. There was still time to get the tablets, to flush the thing out of her with the minimum of inconvenience; she wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of a forceps dilation and an overnight stay at the Portland.

  Then, because it soothed her, she set to work on the house, cleaning and tidying and reorganising - finally, when she was finished, settling down on the couch with the dog and a Sonoma Chardonnay that would, she hoped, go some way towards dulling her awareness of the little interloper living inside her, albeit very temporarily.

  At around 4pm, to her surprise, Justin dragged himself through the door, looking haggard and dishevelled and reeking of cheap alcohol and cigarettes, eyes red-rimmed and remaining hair sticking up from his scalp in childlike tufts. On another man, the dishabille might have been attractive, a signifier of rugged masculinity; on Justin it seemed shabby, pathetic, the physical manifestation of a lack of self-respect.

  “I found something,” he said, before she could ask him what he thought he was doing leaving the office in the middle of the day. “At work. And I don’t... Hannah, I don’t think it’s something they want me to know.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she said. “And what are you doing home so early?”

  He staggered into the lounge and collapsed, to her annoyance, into the space on the couch she’d just vacated.

  “Lou applied for a promotion,” he began. “She’s going for Group Accounting Manager.”

  She was aware, dimly, that Lou was one of his finance team underlings - a meek, becardiganed woman who’d seemed to Hannah more suited to the secretarial pool than to corporate money management.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she snapped.

  “Shut up and I’ll tell you,” Justin snapped back.

  She fell quiet, astonished: she could count on a single hand the number of times he’d dared to raise his voice to her since they’d been married.

  “She asked me for a reference,” he continued, “so I thought I’d better look over some of her work. Due diligence, you know? She’s been processing materials expenditure for the logistics team. It’s straightforward enough, and she’s never been sloppy, but they’re big numbers, and I didn’t want it to come back to bite me if she’d slipped up anywhere.”

  He pressed his fingertips into his temples, as if he were nursing a headache.

  “The details aren’t important, but I took a month at random - last December - and ran through the outgoings… and they don’t make sense. There’s more than double the amount going out than there should be, and a lot of it’s being paid to a supplier I’ve never heard of. I can’t prove it, but I don’t think it’s a real company. I think the money’s being siphoned off.”

  “So old Lou’s had her hand in the till?” Hannah said, still smarting from the way she’d been spoken to. “I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.”

  “It’s not her,” he said, still rubbing at his head. “She’s too junior - all she does is process the outgoings. She doesn’t sign them off. The costs for the shipping department alone are enormous - they need C-suite approval, a Director-level signature.”

  She began to see where he was going with his rambling narrative, and she didn’t like it.

  “I checked,” he added. “I checked who’s been signing them off. And it’s him, Han. It’s Marchant. I don’t know why, but he’s been diverting funds from the company. Stealing from himself.”

  This was bad, she thought. Very bad indeed. Justin was a weakling, but he fancied himself an ethical soul - a man who lived by his principles. And as frightened as he was of his employer, he was undoubtedly more afraid by far of becoming complicit in something illegal, of the possibility of arrest - of prison, even. If he’d found something incriminating, something concrete, then he’d speak out. There was no doubt in her mind.

  But wait.

  Wait.

  Was it all bad? It seemed so on the face of it, yes. But was there something else there, too - an opportunity, for herself if not for Justin? A way of turning this potential clusterfuck around to her advantage - of using it to get what she wanted, what she’d wanted for the last 10 years or more?

  She thought perhaps there might be.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

  She sat down on the couch next to him and, with a tenderness she hoped he wouldn’t find suspicious, cupped his jaw in her hand and pulled his face to hers.

  “I have an idea,” she told him.

  ———

  She’d been nearly 30 when she’d learned James Marchant was her father.

  The news came via her grandmother, whom Hannah had been visiting in her nursing home. She hadn’t wanted to visit; had certainly felt no compassion for the old bitch, even as the Alzheimer’s ate away at her brain and muscle wastage lay claim to the rest of her. It was too late for that; she might not remember the beatings she’d given Hannah as a kid, the ice bath immersions and the screamed incantations masquerading as prayers, but Hannah did. Remembered them very well.

  The regional paper Hannah had been working for then hadn’t paid much, though, and she was struggling with her rent, so submitting to the occasional trip to bedlam had seemed a relatively small price to pay for the likelihood of a generous inheritance, when the time came. And the time was certainly near; the nurses had told her so, albeit euphemistically. She wouldn’t have to wait it out much longer.

  There was a television in the old bitch’s room, a black and white portable. Hannah had long been grateful for its presence - with the TV on, there was no need to struggle for conversation or feign interest in any broken anecdotes about air raid shelters or the interwar years. Instead, she could use the time to sit and think, while her grandmother stared blankly at Nationwide or This Is Your Life. This particular teatime, they’d been watching the news - listening first to Mrs Thatcher on the Soviet problem in Afghanistan, then to a feel-good piece about a large donation made to a newly-opened children’s hospital by a London shipping magnate.

  “That’s him, that is,” the old woman had said, thrusting one shaking finger towards the screen. “That’s your dad.”

  Lovely, Hannah had thought. We’ve reached the confabulation stage of the evening.

  “That’s James Marchant, Gran,” she’d said, trying for soothing. “He’s a businessman. In the city.”

  “He’s your dad,” her grandmother had insisted, sounding for a moment unexpectedly lucid. “I might not have met him, but she had pictures, your Mam did - the police gave them to me after she passed, a big stack of them. I’d remember that nose anywhere.”

  It had come as news to Hannah that anything had been salvaged from her mother’s bedsit after they found her body. She’d assumed that everything of value - sentimental as well as materia
l - had been sold, or traded directly for another bag of the heroin that had eventually killed her.

  “Where?” she’d asked. “Where are the photos?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” the old bitch had cackled with some of her former malice, her gaze never leaving the television. “Wouldn’t you just like to know?”

  If she hadn’t needed the money so badly, Hannah would have suffocated her with a pillow then and there.

  She went straight from the nursing home to her grandmother’s house in Ruislip, the same three-bedroom semi she’d been raised and tormented in from the day her mother had left her in a cot in the living room to the day she’d taken herself away to college, and let herself in with the key she still kept in her purse.

  There was only one place, she’d thought, that a photo album could conceivably be hidden, since she’d pawned so much of the furniture: the loft. So she’d pulled down the hatch in the ceiling of the upstairs corridor and, with the keyring torch she carried in her satchel in her hand, she’d ascended the folding stairs into the spiderwebbed darkness at the top of the house.

  The photos were easy to find; the old bitch had made barely any effort to hide them, burying the album in a pile under half a dozen lengths of dusty wrapping paper.

  They were strange photos, though. Not the posed stills she’d envisaged, with smiling faces turned to the camera in pubs, at the seaside, around the dining table, but what seemed to her like stolen snapshots - taken surreptitiously, at mid-range, without their subject’s knowledge or consent.

  And always the same subject. A young man, younger than she was then, well-dressed and good-looking, performing a succession of mundane activities: eating dinner, a forkful of food raised to his mouth; lighting a fire with a rolled-up newspaper; talking on the telephone, the receiver pressed to his ear. She guessed, from the quality of the film and the cut of the man’s suit, that the majority had been taken in the ‘50s - perhaps just before or just after she was born, in ‘52.

  She couldn’t be absolutely sure, at a distance of three decades, but he’d looked very much like a younger version of James Marchant, the man she’d seen on the news earlier that day - the man the old bitch had said was her father.

  It was possible, she’d conceded, that he could have been. There was no father’s name on her birth certificate, and there’d been no mention - beyond what she’d heard that night - that there’d been other men on the scene for her mother around the time she was born. The story of her conception was - had always been - a void, a hole in the pattern of the world. Her mother was rarely coherent enough to recall events beyond the very immediate past, even when she was around, and her grandmother’s go-to responses to Hannah’s questions - any of her questions at all - had ranged from the lightly chastising to the irrationally violent.

  Probably, then, she’d thought, there was no way of knowing for sure, one way or the other - not definitively.

  But she could certainly gather enough evidence to make an educated guess.

  She’d gone into work at the crack of dawn the following day, and made a point of lingering by the coffee machine until she caught the eye of one of the sub-editors, Derek Proctor - a visually unappealing man whose cluttered desk had been, she suspected deliberately, pushed into the furthest corner of the office, closer to the bank of fax machines than to his other colleagues.

  Derek was short, fat, acne-scarred and ringed by a halo of body odour that the aftershave he doused himself in could never quite mitigate. He’d had a poorly-concealed crush on Hannah since the week she’d started at the Star & Echo. Just as importantly for her purposes that morning, he’d managed the Star’s substantial photo archive - a vast collection of folders containing thousands of images, as he’d once boasted to her after cornering her in the stairwell, that dated back to the ‘30s.

  Upon seeing her, and seeing her see him, he’d immediately disentangled the bulk of his enormous gut from his swivel chair and stumbled towards her, as she’d known he would.

  “Hello, Derek,” she’d said, in the most flirtatious voice she could muster.

  His piggy eyes gleamed.

  “And hello to you too!” he’d wheezed, feasting on the sight of her breasts and hips. She’d imagined him tucking into his second plate of bacon and black pudding with the same grotesque gusto in his kitchen that morning. “In a bit early, aren’t you? We don’t usually see you here until lunchtime!”

  She’d laughed at his quip, a breathy giggle that disgusted her as much coming from her own mouth as it would have done from another woman’s.

  “It’s funny you should ask,” she’d said. “I was looking for you, actually - I wanted to catch you before you got too busy. I was rather hoping you might be able to do me a favour…”

  Ten minutes later, she was at her own desk, a stack of box folders in front of her - the ones Derek had told her were most likely to yield any historical photos they had of James Marchant.

  She’d worked quickly, flipping through page after page of acetate-wrapped stills showcasing some of the big-name industrialists and money-men of the 50s and early 60s, from Julian Mond to a young Robert Maxwell, until she’d found the one she thought she was looking for: a monochrome close-up of James Marchant in white tie and tails, taken (claimed its accompanying label) at a gala event at the Ritz in May 1958.

  She’d opened her bag, took out the photos she’d taken from her grandmother’s house the night before and compared those shots with the gala photo.

  There had been no question: the man in the tie and tails was, undeniably, the man in her mother’s photo albums. The man the old bitch had called her father.

  And was there, she’d wondered, something else familiar about the man - about his skin and his bone structure, his aquiline nose and high cheekbones?

  He looked, she’d realised, very much like her, his face and long, angular body a more masculine variation on her own - the resemblance between them not the coincidental likeness of one stranger to another of their age and race, but the genetically-determined similitude of father and daughter.

  The old bitch had been right, then. He was hers; and she was his.

  After that, she was obsessed - spending every hour she wasn’t working scouring libraries and archives and her growing network of independent contacts for facts about Marchant, his life and business. His family.

  When these seams were exhausted, she’d resolved to obtain her information more directly, through first-hand observation. She began following him, taking notes and photographs of her own: at his home, on the way to and from his multitude of businesses, in the park with his kids. And with his other families, too: the children she’d learned, through months of painstaking research, that he’d fathered with other women, in Harrow and Slough and Hillingdon; the ones he visited when his wife was out of town or, perhaps, so drugged-up on the sleeping pills Hannah had seen her collect from the chemist that she failed to notice when he slipped out of the house before dark.

  She’d realised fairly early on in the process that Marchant - that her father - cared little for these other families; the brevity and infrequency of his visits told her so. He thought of them, she’d suspected, the same way she might think of them herself in his position: as unwise purchases made on impulse, too inconveniently cumbersome to be kept on display but too costly to be discarded altogether. As expensive but poorly-designed furniture, destined for the attic.

  She’d also realised that she had no intention of becoming another of his side-progeny, his secondary children.

  When they met - and they would meet eventually, she’d told herself - it would be as equals. And he wouldn’t tolerate her, as he did the others; wouldn’t consider her a cross to be borne. No; he would respect her. Admire her.

  But she’d have to be smart about it - smart, and patient. It wouldn’t do to rush into engineering a meeting right away. She’d have to lay the right groundwork; have to do something, to earn his respect.

  Her entanglement with and sub
sequent marriage to Justin D’Amboise had come about as a consequence of her observations of her father. He’d caught her standing for two days in a row outside the Bankside HQ, pretending – poorly – to smoke Silk Cut after Silk Cut; on the third day, he’d approached her and asked what she was doing there, since she clearly wasn’t as dedicated a smoker as she seemed anxious to appear.

  She’d spun him a story about job-hunting, about the dearth of opportunities in regional news and her interest in the media division of Marchant Holdings. Did he know of any openings? she’d asked him, crushing her useless, half-smoked cigarette under her heel.

  He’d laughed and said he was in Accounting, so probably not the best person to advise her. And then he’d asked her out for dinner.

  Ordinarily, she’d have turned him down: he was neither charismatic nor particularly handsome, with a weak chin and an albino complexion and a skinny build that not even good tailoring had improved. But then he’d looked down at his watch, sworn and, before she could open her mouth to tell him she wasn’t interested and never would be, had said he was sorry, but he had to go - he had a 2 o’clock meeting, and couldn’t afford to keep his boss waiting.

  “He’s a hell of a businessman, Marchant,” he’d said, “but you don’t mess him around. Not if you value your job.”

  She’d given him her number on the spot.

  Thereafter, Justin - chinless Justin, with his ever-receding hairline - had become her primary source of day-to-day intel on her father. If he suspected that her interest in his employer - in his moods, his habits, his relationship with his colleagues - was anything other than the interest typically afforded a hard-grafting man by his devoted girlfriend at the end of the working day, then he didn’t show it.

  When he’d proposed, she’d said yes - encouraging him to add Marchant and his plus-one to the wedding guest list. When Marchant failed to make an appearance at the chapel, despite his RSVP, the bitterness of her disappointment caused an argument that very nearly put an end to the marriage before they’d cut the cake.