Leicestershire, 1997
Out in the garden, El could still see the fireworks - rockets and Roman Candles mostly, the last few released from their box before her neighbours said goodbye to their guests and retreated to bed in anticipation of the New Year’s Day hangovers that would soon be upon them.
“Pretty,” said Ruby, coming up behind her.
“No light pollution out here,” El replied. “Makes for clearer skies - it’s one of the benefits of being out of the city. You’d know that, if you were up here more.”
“I’m here now, ain’t I?”
To El’s surprise, they all were: not just Ruby but Sita and Karen and Theo, Dexter and his new girlfriend, Kat and the motorised wheelchair she was still learning to operate. Rose had brought Sophie; even Michael had put in an appearance, though he’d spent the night sipping still mineral water and obsessively checking his work pager.
She’d laid out bedding for them in just about every room of the house - so many fold-out camp beds and air mattresses that the cottage looked like a field hospital.
“The countryside suits you,” El observed, only semi-truthfully. “You should go on the run more often.”
“I am not on the run,” said Ruby, affronted. “I’ve just... strategically withdrawn from London. Temporarily.”
She’d been staying in Rotherham, in the house Rose had bought for her foster parents before they died. El had the impression she was finding the north a struggle.
“And when will you be strategically returning?” she asked.
“Soon as I can, sweetheart,” Ruby replied. “Soon as I can, that’s for damn sure.”
———
El had thought she was desensitised; that she was becoming inured to violence, even violent death, after the weeks she’d spent at Ledbury Road and the things she’d heard and seen.
But this was here, right in front of her. And there was so much blood - brutal arterial sprays of it, from floor to ceiling.
Marchant’s throat was gone, a gaping wine-coloured hole where skin and muscle should have been. The handle of the knife projected out from the hole at an angle – an inch of blade visible below it, the rest hidden by layers of ragged flesh. The unimpressive gun lay, useless, by his side.
And over his body knelt Ruby - her clothes soaked red, her face and neck a study in scarlet. She’d been silent; fixed to the spot, her own body as still as Marchant’s.
Remembering where she was, what else had been happening while Marchant had been dying on his daughter’s kitchen floor, El had spun around on the spot, towards Karen and Hannah - expecting to find them still struggling, that she’d have to intervene in Karen’s defence.
But Karen was lying on her back, eyes swollen half-shut, yet more blood cascading from her nose. And Hannah was running out of the kitchen for the front door.
El had sprung forward, ready to run after her.
“Let her go,” Sita had said, with enough authority that El hadn’t thought to disobey. She remembered she’d been shocked; it was usually Ruby who gave the orders, Ruby who made the decisions in a pinch.
“Go?”
This had been from Karen, the effort to speak causing her obvious pain.
“We’ll find her,” said Sita. “Just not now.”
She’d crossed the floor to Ruby and kneeled down next to her, her knees creaking as she bent.
She’s getting older, El had thought; they’re both getting older.
She’d brushed a strand of grey hair from Ruby's face, pressed their heads together until they were temple to temple, and whispered to her - soft, low words that El couldn’t make out.
Then she’d got to her feet, and, after a moment, Ruby had followed.
“Do you have your telephone?” Sita asked El.
El had nodded yes; had held up the phone in her hand as proof.
“Call the boys,” Sita had said. “Not just Dexter - Michael, too. Tell them they’re to come here, now. Tell them their mother and I need them.”
———
Another burst of fireworks sprung up from across the village, showering the garden very briefly in a constellation of yellow and green.
“Is there much to do in Rotherham?” El said.
Ruby snorted disdainfully.
“About as much as you’d expect,” she said. “I’ve been weighing up buying myself a computer, getting on that internet Karen’s always banging on about.”
“She’d have to teach you how to turn it on first.”
She waited to be scolded; told to watch her mouth or she’d get a clip round the ear. Instead, Ruby seemed to be thinking about something.
“As it happens,” she told El, “I know a thing or two already. Picked up a few bits and pieces here and there over the summer when Karen was, you know …”
El did know. And she also knew why Ruby - who didn’t as a rule acknowledge her own embarrassment, only other people’s - sounded close to sheepish.
She and Sita and Karen, El had learned after the fact, hadn’t just been running one con on Marchant. They’d had their own side-job going, one they hadn’t disclosed to the others.
“A little insurance, darling,” Sita had called it. “It’s just our way. We never like to put all our eggs in one basket.”
Karen hadn’t just been bugging offices and redirecting calls at Marchant Holdings, it transpired. She’d also been picking up where Sita and Ruby left off in the ‘60s, sniffing out the numbers and passcodes of Marchant’s Swiss bank accounts – which, they’d accurately guessed, had been swelled significantly by the money he’d been draining from the business.
And she’d found them.
The day of Marchant’s death, managers at the Zurich-based banking group St Helier received instructions to transfer amounts totalling almost £97 million from four separate accounts later discovered by Interpol to have been opened by Marchant himself in 1957. The money landed on the same day in accounts held by two other banks headquartered in the Cayman Islands – one registered to a Martha Lazarus, and the other to an M R Chandravali. Both these accounts were also traced, subsequently, to James Marchant.
After that, the money vanished - directly, or so Interpol and the Metropolitan Police suspected but couldn’t yet prove, into James Marchant’s pockets.
Wherever he was.
The following week, while the UK media were still scratching their heads about where Marchant might have gone after his press conference, a set of videotapes was delivered by anonymous courier to the desk of DCI Laurel Duncan, one-time lead officer on Operation Hornet - the investigation into the arson deaths of Heidi Simpson and her daughter Jade. The video featured, among other things, a lengthy confession from Marchant’s now-deceased head of security, and hidden-camera footage of Marchant himself ordering a hit on a former BBC journalist, now herself missing.
Immediately thereafter, Marchant’s disappearance, previously considered suspicious, was reassessed and reclassified by both Interpol and the Met. Officers earlier urged to look upon Marchant as a possible victim of crime were instructed instead to regard him as a suspect - a fugitive from justice.
Meanwhile, the money - all £96,930,000 of it - was quietly washed and redistributed 6 ways: to Ruby, Sita, Karen, Kat, Rose and El.
Under the circumstances, neither El nor Rose had objected. Nor, when she’d finally been released from hospital and realised the full extent of the equipment and physiotherapy bills she’d be facing, had Kat.
“You planning on becoming a hacker, then?” El asked Ruby. “Or just looking for love over the wires?”
This time Ruby did clip her round the ear. But gently; affectionately.
“What am I missing?” said Michael, stepping through the back door and into the garden. He’d replaced the mineral water, El was pleased to see, with a bottle of light beer.
“You need to keep an eye on your mother,” El told him. “She’s been trawling the net for toyboys.”
“As long as she’s being safe,” Michael replied.
He stooped down to kiss first his mother and then El on the cheek.
“Happy new year,” he said, then added: “Let’s hope this one is less eventful than the last.”
El wondered how he was coping - how he’d reconciled the life he lived, the reputation he’d built, the career he’d dedicated himself to with what Sita and his mother had asked of him that summer.
Dexter, she thought, was probably just fine. She didn’t know exactly what he did for his client, or exactly how dirty he let his hands get doing it, but she had a sense that cleaning up blood and making firearms and bodies disappear wasn’t a million miles shy of it. Nor was tracking missing persons, if the way he’d taken charge of looking for Hannah was anything to go by.
For Michael, though - the straight, respectable City man who, despite everything, had folded back the sleeves of his pinstripe shirt and helped his brother lift the remains of the man his mother had killed onto a plastic sheet - it was almost certainly more of an adjustment.
“It better be,” said Ruby. “It bloody better be.”
———
El was awake by 9.30 the following morning - late by the standards of her usual routine, but early, she considered, for a New Year’s Day.
She crept downstairs as quietly as she could and, stepping over the sleeping forms of Theo and Karen, tiptoed to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
Rose was up already, buttering two rounds of toast.
“Sorry,” she said, in a hushed voice. “Did I wake you?”
“Not at all,” El replied awkwardly. “I’m no good at lie-ins. Especially not with the dawn chorus in there.”
She gestured through the kitchen door to Karen, who was snoring heavily - an unfortunate side-effect, Sita had told her, of the dental work she’d needed after her altercation with Hannah.
“Good,” Rose replied, equally awkwardly. “Good.”
The extra layer of awkwardness between them was new and, to El, unsettling. She couldn’t speak for Rose, but she, at least, knew why it had come about - and, more to the point, who to blame for it.
Her mistake, she thought, had been asking Sita again over one of their weekly lunches why she and Ruby had been so keen to introduce her to Rose, even before they’d known about the Marchant connection.
Without Ruby there to silence her, Sita was less circumspect.
“The thing is, darling,” she’d said, “we worry about you, Auntie Ruby and I. You enjoy your own company, and Lord knows we respect that, but no woman is an island. You need someone - someone who knows you, who understands you. Someone you don’t have to lie to about our… escapades. Someone to bring you breakfast in bed in the morning.”
It took a full minute and two more bites of baba ganoush before the penny dropped.
“You were trying to set me up with her?” El had demanded.
Sita had tutted.
“Honestly,” she’d said. “As if we’d do anything so crass. We were only hoping to... bring you together.”
“And let fate takes its course, is that it?”
The old woman had smiled and sipped at her wine.
“Really,” she’d said, “is that so bad?”
In the living room, Karen let out another snore - a long, slow death-rattle that reminded El of the fireworks of the night before.
“Do you have any jam?” Rose asked.
“What?” El said, shaking off the memory of Sita and Ruby and their meddling.
“Jam. For the toast.”
Rose was looking at her strangely, appraisingly, and El wondered whether she’d had her own conversation with Sita, or with Ruby up in Rotherham. And if she had, what exactly had been said.
There was a knock on the door, soft and tentative.
Rose jumped, dropping the butter knife onto her plate with a clatter. She’d been more nervous than usual since Marchant’s death, El knew; nervous, and more protective than ever of Sophie. El could hardly blame her.
“It’s probably just the neighbours apologising for the fireworks,” she told her, trying for reassurance. “They leave a fruit basket by the gate whenever they play music past 10.30, so they’re probably wracked with guilt this morning. Give me a second?”
She traversed the living room obstacle course a second time and sprinted to the front door before whoever it was could knock again.
She opened the door, and found Harriet Marchant on the doorstep.
“Hello,” she said, squinting uncertainly at El as if checking she’d got the right woman, the right house. “I don’t know if you’ll remember me, we only met briefly and I gather you were… someone else at the time, but I thought…”
She paused; took a breath.
“I’m Harriet Marchant,” she said, more calmly. “Jim Marchant’s daughter. Do you think I might come in?”
———
El made tea. Three cups: one for her, one for Rose and one for Harriet.
“I know you killed my father,” Harriet said when El joined them at the kitchen table.
Silence.
“What do you plan to do with that information?” Rose replied eventually.
“Buy you dinner?” said Harriet.
She laughed. Neither Rose nor El did.
“He was a psychopath,” she said, more seriously. “And I mean that in the clinical sense, not just pejoratively. I realise I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I want you to know that I know it. I don’t know what exactly prompted you to do what you did - and please, don’t tell me, I’d rather not know - but I know what he was like, and I’m sure I could take a guess, if I were inclined. If anyone deserved to die, it was him.”
Another silence.
“How?” El asked eventually. “How did you find out?”
Harriet looked at her and smiled.
“I had you followed,” she said. “After the day we met in his office. He introduced you as his campaign manager once you’d left, but I had a feeling you weren’t… entirely who you’d told him you were.”
She’s a psychologist, El remembered. She sees through people.
And she’s good. Or maybe I’m not as good as I think I am.
“And what did you discover?” Rose said - remarkably calmly, Rose thought.
“A fair amount,” said Harriet. “Who all of you are, for example. That you’re… sorry, I’m not sure what the word is. Grifters?”
El shrugged.
“Works for me,” she said.
“What else?” said Rose.
“I know he came to your house in Notting Hill the day he disappeared,” Harriet told her. “And that he didn’t come out again. I know that, that same evening, two men were seen carrying what looked like a very large rug but was probably my father’s body into the back of an estate car and driving it away. And I can’t say for sure, but I’m reasonably certain that if the police were to look, they’d find some of the money they say he stole from the company in your bank accounts.”
Rose tensed; balled her hands into fists.
“Is that all?” she said.
She wants to know if you know the other thing, El thought. If you’ve figured out that she’s your sister.
“Are you asking if I know who we are to each other?” Harriet said.
“I suppose I am,” Rose answered quietly.
“Then yes,” said Harriet, equally quiet. “Yes, I do know. And perhaps one day, when this has blown over completely, we could go for a coffee. See if we have anything to talk about, besides him. But for now,” she added, “I wanted to…”
She hesitated.
“What?” said El, unsure of where the conversation would take them next - any of them.
“I wanted you to know that you’re safe - from me, at least. That what I know will stay with me. I have no interest in talking to anyone about it, least of all the police.”
I believe her, El realised. I believe every word she’s saying.
“Why?” she asked - needing more, some confirmation that she was readi
ng things right, that they were safe.
Harriet bit her lip.
“He took your mothers,” she said. “Took them from you, both of them. But he kept mine. Kept her for almost 50 years. I won’t ask you to imagine what it was like for her, or for me and my brothers. But whatever it was you did to him in that house… frankly, I wish I’d found the nerve to do it myself.”
———
She left quickly after that, her tea untouched, letting herself out of the back door of the cottage.
El and Rose stayed at the table, lost in their respective thoughts.
“Should we tell the others?” El said, when she heard the garden gate click shut.
“Is there anything to tell, if she keeps her word?” Rose replied.
She stood up.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I could do with another cup of tea. Can I make you one?”
El thought about Elizabeth Marchant and her children; about mothers and daughters, and losing and keeping. Finally, maddeningly, she thought that perhaps Sita was right – that it might be nice to have someone to bring her breakfast in bed, or at the very least a cup of tea.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be great.”
About the Author
Natalie Edwards is a cultural researcher with a long-standing interest in cons and con artists. A former lecturer and copywriter (among other things), she lives in Leicestershire with her partner and two children. The Debt is her first novel.
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