The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Read online

  The Push

  Natalie Edwards

  Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Edwards

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover art by Kealan Patrick Burke.

  For my family: Siân, Alex & Zachary

  Contents

  Cricklewood, London

  From the Daily Register

  From The Capital Independent

  From The Bracknell Star & Echo

  I. May/June

  1. Maida Vale, London

  2. West Hampstead, London

  3. Saffron Walden, Essex

  4. Stroud, Gloucestershire

  5. Kingston, London

  6. Saffron Walden, Essex

  7. Saffron Walden, Essex

  8. South Kensington, London

  9. Edgware, London

  10. Edgware, London

  11. Herne Bay, Kent

  II. September

  From The Evening Review

  From The Oakland Girlfriend

  12. Cow Hollow, San Francisco

  13. Herne Bay, Kent

  14. Presidio Heights, San Francisco

  15. South of Market, San Francisco

  16. West Hampstead, London

  17. The Tenderloin, San Francisco

  18. West Hampstead, London

  19. Presidio Heights, San Francisco

  III. July/August

  20. Matlock, Derbyshire

  21. Caledonian Road, London

  22. Follifoot, Harrogate

  23. Bromley, London

  IV. September/October

  24. Flight EXK 255 (SFO to LHR)

  25. Herne Bay, Kent

  26. West Hampstead, London

  27. West Hampstead, London

  28. Pacific Avenue, San Francisco

  29. Herne Bay, Kent

  30. Embarcadero, San Francisco

  31. Herne Bay, Kent

  32. Lancaster Gate, London

  Allemore Castle, Loch Lomond

  About the Author

  Also by Natalie Edwards

  Cricklewood, London

  May 1972

  She picked the lock with a hair clip. It was a flimsy thing, shield brass looped through a hasp staple, and it came away in her hands in half a minute - the time it might have taken another woman to prise it open with a difficult key in the dark.

  When the padlock was in her purse, she stood up on her tiptoes and shoved the door upwards until it disappeared into the ceiling. It was lighter than she’d expected, but neglected, the metal beginning to rust. Some of the paint peeled off in her hand as she pushed, flakes of it gathering in the soft leather palm of her driving glove.

  The garage was empty, as she’d known it would be, nothing but a stack of dusty cardboard boxes catching in the beams as she swept left to right with her torch. She kicked the boxes into the corner with the tip of one boot - then, conscious of any footprints she might have made in the dust, wiped them clean with a handkerchief.

  The ground cleared, she crept outside and back to the grey Morris van idling outside the lockup, its headlights off. She kept them off as she inched it forward, past the open door and into the space the boxes had left behind - trusting her night vision to steer her away from any obstacles she might have missed on first inspection. Then she turned off the engine.

  In the dark, she stretched out a hand to the holdall on the passenger seat beside her; unzipped it and, with the torch, scanned the contents: three antique shotguns, the muzzle of one spattered with dried brown spots of what might have looked, in a better light, like blood.

  She’d wiped them down already, more than once. But, reasoning that it wouldn’t hurt to err on the side of over-caution, she took a chamois cloth from the pocket of her coat and wiped all three of them again, stock to barrel - making sure to leave the might-be-blood exactly where it was.

  From the same pocket as the chamois she took a sheaf of bank notes, the tens and twenties thickly stacked and held together with a cashier’s roll of paper ribbon, and let them drop to the floor of the van with a flutter.

  Finally, from her other pocket, she withdrew something thin and circular and bound in clingfilm. She unwrapped it; turned it around in her gloved fingers, letting its edges catch the torchlight. It was a pendant - a cheap gold disc on a weak link-chain, a haloed St Nicholas carved into its face.

  This too she let drop to the floor.

  She slid from the driving seat and out of the van; shuffled backwards out of the lockup and, again on her tiptoes, grasped the garage door with both hands, pulling it closed behind her. Through the hasp staple she threaded a new magnetic padlock, more robust and more expensive than its predecessor, and secured it with a small silver key, which she slipped into her purse once its purpose was served.

  Satisfied she’d done everything she needed to, she buttoned up her coat and strode purposefully away from the lockup and down the brick-walled path that ran parallel to the unit of rentals, letting herself disappear into the warren of alleyways separating the narrow residential streets from the Cricklewood Broadway.

  She reappeared not far from Willesden Green station, and made for the squat convertible car she’d left parked next to the bus depot. It was a Chevy Corvette, an original 1953 model: incongruous in the North London suburbs but perfectly preserved, only recently delivered to its owner from California.

  She jumped into the driving seat without opening the door, a move that under normal circumstances would have brought her a shiver of pleasure, and sped off towards Hendon and the A5 back to Edgware - though not home, not straight away. There were things she had to do, still.

  Plans to put in motion. Calls she had to make.

  From the Daily Register

  11th February 1955

  Textile Heir’s Baby Snatched From Crib

  * * *

  Mother and Father Taken To Hospital; No Ransom Yet, Say Police

  * * *

  The infant daughter of textile heir Edward Wainwright and wife Gillian has been kidnapped.

  Little Ingrid Wainwright, aged just 18 months, was asleep in her nursery in her parents’ house in Harrogate at 9 o’clock on Tuesday night when the masked kidnappers struck.

  In a violent exchange, Mr and Mrs Wainwright were set upon with coshes and their wrists and ankles tied by two of the attackers, while a third man seized Ingrid from her cot and bundled her downstairs. All three kidnappers then fled the property, leaving Mr Wainwright unconscious and bleeding with what was later diagnosed as a broken nose and collarbone.

  No ransom demands have yet been made, according to police, but this is assumed the most likely motive for the kidnapping.

  Edward Wainwright is the son and sole heir of William Wainwright, founder of the million-pound Fine Cloth clothing company. A popular and flamboyant figure, the younger Mr Wainwright has served as his father’s second-in-command since leaving school at age 15, taking Fine Cloth from a single stall in the Shambles area of York to a chain of 12 shops and half a dozen factories spread across the West and North Yorkshire regions.

  Ingrid is his only child.

  From The Capital Independent

  13th April 1972

  One Killed, 2 Wounded In Woolwich Bank Shooting

  * * *

  An elderly man was killed and two others wounded today during an armed raid on a Woolwich building society.

  * * *

  Police said bank employees were handing over up to £20,000 at gunpoint when the robbers opened fire, shooting
the customer point-blank in the chest and leaving two cashiers severely wounded.

  * * *

  The masked thieves burst into the Powis Street branch of the Blackheath Mutual at around 9.30am this morning and demanded that staff empty their cash registers, fleeing with the money when the shooting subsided.

  * * *

  Police have not yet named the dead man, but have identified him as a 79 year old resident of the Greenwich area.

  From The Bracknell Star & Echo

  17th April 1997

  James Marchant: A New Man?

  * * *

  Billionaire CEO James Marchant vanished last year amid a £20m embezzlement scandal and rumours of his involvement in at least one murder.

  In the 9 months since his disappearance, numerous sightings of Marchant have been reported from eyewitnesses in New York, Mumbai and Buenos Aires, although none have been verified.

  Others, including television psychic Trisha Langdon, have suggested that Marchant may be dead already.

  Police state that there is “no proof whatsoever” of his death, and that investigations into his activities prior to his disappearance continue.

  It’s thought possible that Marchant used the money taken last year from his own Swiss bank accounts to buy a new identity, including a forged birth certificate and passport which would have allowed him to travel unnoticed to another countries.

  And now, according to the woman who says she was his lover, he’s working as a musician in a Sydney jazz bar.

  Singer Nell Ryder, 41, claims to have enjoyed a passionate 3-month affair with Marchant in the Australian city, which ended only when she left for Melbourne to promote her latest album, Starwalker.

  “It was lust at first sight, really,” Ms. Ryder said. “I didn’t know then who he was, but I knew from looking at him that he had to be someone important. He had that look, you know?”

  Though she refused to disclose what Marchant was calling himself in the time she knew him, she indicated that it “wasn’t a million miles away” from his real name.

  “I used to call him Dizzy, after Dizzy Gillespie,” she added. “You’d know why, if you ever heard him play.”

  * * *

  Continued on page 3.

  Part I

  May/June

  Chapter 1

  Maida Vale, London

  June 1997

  El didn’t know what to eat.

  It was an uncomplicated menu: Italian, nothing but pasta and pizza and, for the very ambitious, carpaccio and squid. Two wines, white and red; three desserts, two of which were gelato. The level of cognitive engagement it demanded of its diners was minimal, or should have been.

  And still, she couldn’t choose.

  It had been plaguing her for a while, this decision paralysis - intermittently, then more constantly since she’d given up what she thought of as The Job, but what was, she was starting to suspect, less a Job than a Vocation. There was no small irony in this, she knew - a big decision effectively excising her ability to make even the most minor one, until she felt barely capable of picking tea over coffee (or Ovaltine, or hot chocolate) or matching a pair of socks to a sweater in the morning.

  But knowing wasn’t helping. And it brought her not a hair’s breadth closer to alighting on a dinner order.

  “Do you know what you want?” asked the woman on the other side of the table, looking down at her own menu.

  El suppressed a laugh.

  No, she thought. I can honestly say, I don’t.

  “What are you having?” she replied. “I’ll have the same.”

  The woman, Rose - Lady Rose Winchester to the post office and Britain’s more aristocratically-oriented celebrity gossip magazines - scrutinised El for a second, then nodded.

  “Let’s go with pizza, shall we?” she said.

  She topped up her glass, then El’s from the complimentary bottle of red they’d been given on arrival - Rose’s name on the reservation, El presumed, carrying some clout with the maître’d’ even in this particularly exclusive enclave of Little Venice - and took a long, deep draught that left the glass half-empty.

  “Thirsty?” said El, smiling.

  Rose glanced down at the glass and, apparently realising what she’d done, pressed a hand to her mouth in embarrassment.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, not meeting El’s eyes. “I think I may have forgotten how to conduct myself in the company of adults.”

  This dinner, El knew, was her first evening out in months - the first time she’d felt able to leave Sophie, her daughter, at a friend’s overnight. Sophie was thirteen now, and prone to minor acts of rebellion - most recently dyeing the fringe of her red hair canary yellow and studding her navel with a barbell piercing that, El had heard, continued to horrify her mother. But Rose was protective; zealously so lately. And her caution had kept them both indoors more than Sophie would have liked, the windows locked and the front doors double-bolted behind them.

  Rose’s anxiety over Sophie’s safety - entirely justified though it was, after the events that had engulfed them all the previous year - had also prompted a change of address over the Easter holidays: mother and daughter exchanging their Notting Hill terrace, albeit grudgingly in Sophie’s case, for a three-bed penthouse flat in Lancaster Gate. The flat was famed for its view of Hyde Park, its Olympic-sized basement swimming pool - and, most importantly for Rose’s purposes, its in-house security personnel, a 24-hour response team recruited exclusively from the British and Israeli armed forces.

  “We can talk about the Spice Girls, if you like?” El offered. She took a sip from her own glass, privately thankful that the decision to fill it had been made for her.

  “Oh, the Spice Girls are out,” Rose said. “It’s all Tori Amos and Fiona Apple now. I have to remind myself when I walk past her bedroom that it isn’t Sophie who’s screaming.”

  El flashed back to her own teen enthusiasm for Siouxsie and the Banshees, short-lived as it had been. Even as a kid, her interest in music - like her interest in fashion - was negligible; in adulthood it had vanished altogether. She couldn’t remember when she’d last bought a tape or a CD for herself - or as herself, for that matter. The shelves of her study at home held as many albums as they did books, an illogically eclectic audio library of Kraftwerk and Mantovani, Northern Soul and Appalachian bluegrass. But none of them belonged to her, in the strictest sense. They were Jill Taylor’s, Carla Finnegan’s, Lydia Chopra’s, Claire Brandon’s - even Alison Miller’s. And taken together, they were an archive: a room-sized testament to the tastes and curiosities of the women she’d been, the skins she’d worn and shed.

  What they weren’t were hers. You couldn’t look at them - or at the books, or even at the artwork on the walls - and get any sense at all of who El was, what she liked.

  Which was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it? There was no record of the things she liked, because she’d never really liked much of anything, beyond The Job. She’d never stayed El Gardener long enough to cultivate passions or strange enthusiasms of her own.

  And if she didn’t know what she liked, how could she possibly be equipped to choose anything?

  Across the table, Rose had stopped talking; was watching her, quizzically.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  El considered telling her, confiding a little of the new life-crisis that seemed to have overtaken her - perhaps even asking for advice.

  In theory, Rose was the ideal listener, one of the very few people to have known El as El for longer than a couple of months - and not as Carla Finnegan, or Lydia Chopra, or one of the hundreds of other pseudonyms she’d accumulated on the job. And Rose knew first-hand what it meant to cast off a name and an identity for another, to reinvent yourself from scratch in the blink of an eye. In theory, she got it; she understood.

  But telling her what would also mean acknowledging why. Why she’d stopped working; why she’d found herself saddled with the unenviable task of figuring out who she was and w
hat she wanted - not at thirteen, like Sophie, but at thirty three. Which would mean, in turn, looking full in the face what she and Rose and the one-time colleagues they had in common had been dancing around since the previous year: the death - the killing - of Rose’s father in her Notting Hill kitchen, and the fallout that had scattered all of them thereafter across the city, and beyond it.

  Neither of them wanted that, surely?

  “Tired,” she said, washing the lie down with a second sip of wine. She doubted Rose believed her for a second - but was sure, equally, that she’d appreciate the effort to spare them both that particular conversational turn.

  “Understandable,” said Rose. “I haven’t been sleeping well myself, though I can’t imagine that’s a revelation. I’ve seen how these look.”