The Remembrance Page 14

  “It’s okay,” she said gently - stepping in closer, letting her hand move from Rose’s back to her waist, as much to dissuade her from kicking out or throwing another punch as to offer support. “You can stop. It’s okay."

  “She’s a monster,” Rose whispered, sounding to El as if she’d run a marathon. “She’s like him. Just exactly like him.”

  The him was Marchant, El knew. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

  “I know she is,” El said. A thick lock of hair had come free from the onyx clip Rose used to keep it out of her face; El smoothed it down, tucked it back behind Rose’s ear. “I know. But it won’t help to keep hurting her.”

  “You should listen to your girlfriend,” Hannah said from the floor, a line of blood trickling from her cut lips down onto the tiles. “She’s not wrong.”

  “Do you want to get your teeth knocked out?” El told her. “Because I guarantee that’s what’ll happen, if you keep talking.”

  Hannah wiped the blood from her mouth with the sleeve of her trench coat; began, warily, to pull herself up from the floor.

  “No,” Ruby said - so abruptly, every one of them turned her way.

  “No?” El asked her.

  “No. She needs to finish. We might not like it - we ain’t gonna like it - but we need to know, don’t we? What she knows, what she’s passed along to our Dolly. What Dolly’s got planned.”

  “I’m glad at least one of you is thinking sensibly,” Hannah said, rubbing a spread palm against her injured stomach.

  “Don’t fucking push it,” Karen warned her. “Wanting to hear what it is you’ve got to say’s the only thing stopping me from laying you out right now.”

  Hannah looked as if she was getting ready to launch into a comeback; then appeared - wisely, El considered - to think better of it.

  “Finish your story,” said Ruby, gravely. “Now.”

  Hannah had left Madera’s house in the mountains that day almost certain that her plan had worked: that even with her own sister in the mix, Madera was primed to clean up the mess Hannah’s father’s death had left behind.

  She hadn’t seemed to react at all to Hannah’s use of Ruby Redfearn’s name; had neither blinked nor flinched, leaving Hannah to conclude that the Redfearn sisters - the Madera sisters, perhaps? - had a relationship more akin to hers and Rose’s than any closer familial bond.

  Which would surely make things easier. For everyone, with the possible exception of Redfearn herself.

  They’d agreed to meet again the following day, back at Madera’s house. Madera needed, she’d said, to consult with an associate, who might in turn have questions for Hannah - Lucian Carruthers, Hannah had assumed. Every report she’d been given had identified him as Madera’s right-hand man; the one whom she’d worked with the longest.

  She hadn’t asked Hannah if she’d mind coming back; had simply told her where to be, and when, as if she knew there was no possibility at all of Hannah refusing. Which would have been altogether infuriating, had Hannah not had a larger goal in sight.

  In fact, twenty-four hours had proven too long for Madera to wait to see her a second time.

  She’d been having dinner in the restaurant at her hotel - a frustratingly over-done Kobe steak and an absurdly elaborate pomegranate salad - when the pair of them had joined her at her table: Madera in the seat across from her, an inappropriately romantic candle flaring between them, and Carruthers actually next to Hannah, encroaching onto her space by dint of the sheer size of his quads and deltoids and biceps.

  He’d been larger in person than she’d expected, bigger even than Lomax - an absolute Atlas of a man. But terribly young looking, though she’d guessed him to be not all that much younger than she was: baby-faced, his pudgy child’s features mounted on the body of a professional heavyweight wrestler. What remained of his straight, dark hair grew past his ears, but had thinned to almost nothing at the crown and temples, and there was a smattering of acne across his tanned cheeks - in both cases, Hannah had suspected, as a result of the steroids he must surely have been pumping into himself at the gym. He hadn’t seemed, at least from the hunch of his posture and the expressionlessness of his raisin eyes and cherub’s mouth, as if he intended to come across as intimidating, but she’d felt the very fact of him beside her as an intimidation, nonetheless.

  “This is a surprise,” she’d said, keeping her voice even, casual.

  She’d doubted they had plans to harm her - not there and then, in public. This wasn’t The Godfather.

  But equally - she hadn’t told them where she was staying, had she? Had been very careful to not so much as hint at which part of the city she’d be heading back to, in her conversations with Madera.

  So that was a worry.

  “When was this?” Ruby interrupted her. “When did all this happen?”

  She was trying to keep the timeline clear in her head, El thought: to establish how long Madera had known about them. How long they’d had a target on their collective backs.

  “February,” Hannah answered, running the tip of one nail gingerly along her cut bottom lip. “You noticed your money gone not long after that, I’m guessing?”

  “It wasn’t just money we lost,” El said quietly - thinking of her cottage; of the smoking, stinking rubble that was all that was left of the things she’d spent a lifetime accumulating.

  Rose, calmer now, slipped an arm of her own around El’s waist; pulled her in closer.

  Hannah rolled her eyes at them.

  “Remember what I said, about wanting to deck you?” Karen told her. “I’m not seeing much that’s dampening that impulse.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes again, defiantly. But continued her story.

  “We had a few questions,” Madera had replied - her accent back to the same bland Transatlantic drone she’d adopted when she’d first met Hannah by the gates of her house in the mountains, the one that could have been from anywhere or nowhere. “Lucian had a few questions.”

  The leviathan beside her shifted in his seat, the metal slats straining audibly under the weight of him.

  “Oh?” Hannah had said.

  “So, I made some calls, right after you and Thea talked earlier,” Carruthers began - his voice an entirely inoffensive, even slightly mellifluous variant on California Surfer, rather than the rumbling bass his appearance had led her to expect. “Spoke to a couple friends in London.”

  Where is he going with this? she’d wondered. Who could he possibly have spoken to, and about her?

  “And these friends,” he’d continued, “they put in a couple more calls to some friends of theirs… And from what those guys said… it seems like maybe you know the women you talked to Thea about a little better than you let on? Like, maybe you worked with them before?”

  “On a con, by all accounts,” Madera had added. “Interesting, you not mentioning that when you came by to see me.”

  Hannah had frozen in place, her glass of too-warm Chardonnay hovering between hand and mouth.

  They thought she’d thrown in with Redfearn and the other women, she’d realised; had heard enough of what she’d been up to two years earlier, from whichever only half-reliable sources they’d tapped into, to believe that, rather than infiltrating Redfearn’s little gang in the interests of helping her father subdue them, Hannah had actually been one of them. Had worked with them, not against them.

  Which meant that Madera, in all likelihood, believed that Hannah was trying to hoodwink her, somehow; to lay a trap for her by feeding her misinformation, or omitting key points that might radically alter the shape and implications of the tale Hannah had told her.

  Which was, in turn, a somewhat uncomfortable - and in all probability, very dangerous - position for Hannah to have found herself in.

  “It’s not what you think,” she’d said, immediately regretting her choice of words. It’s not what you think? What was she, a cheating husband trying to allay the concerns of a suspicious wife with a pocketful of Travelodge receipts
? She wouldn’t have believed herself, with a line like that.

  “No?”

  It had been Madera who’d answered. Carruthers had only sat there, wet mouth pursed in consternation and muscles flexing and loosening in tiny - she assumed involuntary - motions, as if he’d been performing a set of Kegel exercises under the tablecloth.

  “No. I pretended to work with them, very briefly - perhaps that was what your friend’s friend was referring to? But only for my father’s benefit. I was never, you know… one of them.”

  “You sure about that?” Madera had said. “You sure they didn’t just - let’s say, for example - cut you out of a job, and now you want to get your own back by getting rid of them?”

  It hadn’t sounded like a threat - it had been almost conversational, in fact, the way she’d framed the question. If Hannah had been an outsider, listening in, she might almost have believed Madera had asked it in nothing more than the spirit of legitimate curiosity.

  Almost, but not quite.

  “Positive,” Hannah had said brightly, working to project both absolute sincerity and a firm conviction that both Madera and Carruthers were, of course, reasonable people more than capable of parsing the reality of a given situation from unverified scuttlebutt. “It’s a misunderstanding, obviously. I’m just glad you brought it to me so we could get it cleared up. Now, can I tempt you to a glass of wine?”

  She’d waved the all but full bottle of Chardonnay at them, smiling with such maniacal good humour that her cheeks had spasmed, and had scarcely waited for Madera to grace her with an indifferent nod before she’d filled the empty glasses by their placemats up to the brim.

  “Cheers!” she’d toasted them, still grinning like a lunatic as she’d downed the remainder of her own wine.

  They didn’t believe her; that much had been clear. But perhaps, she’d told herself, it didn’t matter? If they’d bothered to ask around after her, then the odds were good that they’d looked into Redfearn and the others already. That they’d found that what she’d told Madera - about them, at least - checked out.

  It would have been a moment’s work for Carruthers to confirm that there really was a Gerry Adler at the Met; would have taken only a little more informal digging for him to ascertain that Adler was - as Hannah had assured Madera he was - a close friend of Sita’s. Hell, Carruthers and Madera might even have had their tech man determine that it really was Karen Baxter who’d delivered that first incriminating video of Ricky Lomax to the police, in the wake of her father’s disappearance.

  And if they had looked, and they had found enough to convince themselves that they were liable to be dropped in the shit at any moment… then they almost certainly would want Redfearn and the others out of the picture, regardless of what they believed to be Hannah’s motivations for wanting them gone.

  The train of thought had reassured Hannah; not completely, but enough that she’d been able to relax sufficiently to enjoy another glass of the inadequate wine, more or less secure in the knowledge that she wasn’t about to be stabbed to death with a butter knife over her salad.

  Until the moment when, three sips later, the residual fear had hit her bladder, and she’d needed, quite urgently, to pee.

  She’d been ninety percent sure that, if she were to get up and leave the table for the bathroom, neither Madera nor Carruthers would follow her; that she’d be free to empty her bladder troubled by neither physical violence nor the immediate threat of it.

  That missing ten percent, however, had been enough to keep her in her seat, her own pelvic floor muscles clenching, until she could take no more, and had had no choice but to excuse herself and race away from the table to the facilities.

  The restaurant had been bookended between the hotel lobby and its cocktail bar, and sandwiched on either side by what had been, until the tobacco ban imposed on California workplaces that year, twin smoking lounges, partitioned off from the restaurant by opaque Japanese slide-panels - a fact imparted unto her five minutes after she’d arrived at the hotel from the airport by a disgruntled concierge none too happy to see her reaching into her purse for a packet of Marlboro Lights.

  This layout, she’d suspected, would likely have afforded Carruthers - though not Madera, across the table from him - a clear view of her as she performed her rapid crabwalk to the restrooms. What neither he nor Madera could have known, though - and what Hannah herself had learned only after two consecutive nights of dining in the place - was that those restrooms were accessible through two doors: the second opening out onto not the lobby, as the one she’d entered through had, but the left-hand smoking lounge. An area which had run, very conveniently for Hannah’s purposes, parallel to the table at which she’d left Madera and Carruthers sipping at their Chardonnay.

  And perhaps it might be sensible, she’d told herself as she’d entered the restroom through the first door, to take advantage of that particular architectural quirk.

  She’d peed; dislodged the day’s gathered clumps of mascara from the corner of her eyes with a fingernail and then - with no concrete plan in mind but a moment or two of eavesdropping - left the restroom via the second door, spilling out into the narrow stretch of maroon carpet and ashtray-smelling leather armchairs concealed behind the Japanese panels.

  Then she’d had only to manoeuvre herself, surreptitiously, to the appropriate section of panel, place an equally surreptitious ear to the divider, and listen.

  She’d been close enough to the table to catch the conversation playing out between Madera and Carruthers in her absence - though not, thankfully, close enough for them to be aware of her breath catching and discharging at the things she’d heard.

  “She still in that bathroom?” Madera had said.

  “Guess so,” Carruthers had told her. “Haven’t seen her come out.”

  “What do you think, then?”

  “Do I think she’s lying, you mean?”

  “Oh, I know she’s lying. Just can’t quite put my finger on what about yet. She’s not quite right, is she? Not right in the head at all. You can see it, just from looking at her. Not… how would you put it? Stable. It’s true what she said, though, about that Gardener girl and the rest of them - I’ll give her that. I spoke to Henry Anderson myself this afternoon. You know him?”

  “The forger guy’s son? Sure. Think I met him when we went to Golders Green that time. Or was it Little Venice? No offence, but it all kinda looks the same to me once you get out of the West End.”

  “It was Willesden. Anyway, I spoke to him, and she’s not lying about that, at least. Gardener and… the rest of them: it looks as if they did do something to Marchant, before he vanished off the face of the Earth. And they’re definitely talking to someone at Scotland Yard.”

  Had it been Hannah’s imagination, or had Madera stumbled slightly over the rest of them?

  “What do you want to do about it?” Carruthers had asked.

  There’d been a small pause; just long enough for one of the two - she’d thought probably Carruthers - to loudly chew and swallow something Hannah had guessed to be a piece of bread.

  “She’ll need getting rid of,” Madera had concluded, when Carruthers - it had to have been Carruthers - had concluded his mastication. “Women like that, unstable women - they can bring a world of trouble to your doorstep, if you let them. It’ll have to wait until we’ve done the other ones - Gardener and all that lot. We definitely can’t have them up and about if they’re running their mouths off. But afterwards… yeah. She’ll need to go.”

  “What then?” Ruby said, levelly.

  “Then?” Hannah raised a palm to her mouth to disperse yet more of the blood but succeeded only in smearing a streak of it across her cheek. “Then I put on my big girl pants, went back into the bathroom and let them see me walking back to the table. Where I sat down, finished my steak and made pleasant conversation about nothing until they finished their drinks and left.”

  “Then what?” Karen pressed her. “Not even a psycho bitch li
ke you’d just hang around waiting to see what happened after that.”

  Hannah grimaced.

  “You know,” she replied, “I’m going to end up with a complex, if people don’t stop questioning my sanity. And no - as it happens, I didn’t just hang around waiting to be murdered. I paid my bill, went back up to my room, packed my suitcase and got on the first flight out of L.A. that would sell me a ticket.”

  “In February,” Ruby said, seeming to El very deep in thought. “Two months ago, that was. And you’re only just here now, telling us this. So what were you doing in them two months, while our Dolly and her lot were robbing us blind?”

  “It’s obvious, innit?” Karen told her. “She’s been sharking around looking for other ways out of the hole she’s dug herself into. We’re not Plan B - we’re her last resort.”

  El couldn’t disagree. Perhaps she’d have done the same in Hannah’s position, though she struggled to imagine herself ever being in Hannah’s position - laid low somewhere that wasn’t Britain or the States, stockpiling all the cash and paperwork she could get her hands on, trying to pull together something like a plan to make herself disappear, permanently and untraceably.

  Though evidently for Hannah, this strategy hadn’t paid dividends. Why else would she be with them now, after everything?

  “I prefer only option,” Hannah said tartly. “But you’re right, obviously. It’s you lot or a bullet in the head. And I’ve always been a pragmatist, as I’m sure you remember.”

  “And what do you think it is we’ll do to look out for you, now you’re here?” Ruby asked her. “Last time we let you anywhere near us, you tried to have us bumped off. You just about killed young Kat over there. And this whole thing started, if I’ve understood right, ‘cause you tried to have us bumped off again. You ain’t one of us. And you certainly ain’t welcome.”