The Remembrance Read online

  Rose tensed again in El’s arms; El tightened her grip around her waist, pre-emptively.

  “You need me,” Hannah said, so matter-of-factly El could have hit her. “I know things - about your sister and her crew, about the way they operate. I may, ironically, be your best chance of putting an end to her. Of keeping yourselves alive.”

  “How do you reckon that, then? Think you know a way to stop her, do you?”

  Hannah shook her head in a mocking facsimile of disappointment.

  “Stop her? Really - have you even been listening to what I’ve said? You can’t stop her. She’s a bloody machine - her whole life has been about putting people in the ground, even people who don’t want to be found and go to very great lengths to keep themselves hidden. People cleverer than all of you, I hasten to add. No - what you need to do is eliminate her altogether, if you don’t want to spend the rest of what lives you’ll have hiding out and looking over your shoulders. You need to kill her. For all our sakes.”

  Chapter 17

  Ludgate Hill, London, April 1998

  Rohan Rasmussen’s London pied-à-terre was nothing at all like the luxurious apartment his mother had left behind in Kensington.

  If Sita’s former home had been a case-study in opulence, a Versailles-esque explosion of rococo furniture and neoclassicist artwork, then Rohan’s investment property in the City was a scene from a zen garden - a minimalist, monochromatic set of rooms with the consciously cultivated characterlessness of a modern hotel room.

  Or had been, until the weight of Sita’s accumulated possessions had landed on it with the force of a farmhouse on a wicked witch.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Sita said, making her way along what seemed like the only navigable path through the wooden crates and cardboard boxes that vied for floorspace with the loveseats, gilded mirrors and chests of drawers she’d brought with her in the move - a tea set, milk and sugar bowl balanced precariously on the Florentine tray she was carrying. “There’s rather a lot to unpack.”

  “Really, it’s fine,” El told her, rising from the waist-high pile of books she’d been perching on and taking the tray from Sita’s hands. “You should see how we’re living. I’m not sure there was much space in that flat even before Harriet let us stay.”

  Sita settled herself on the edge of a dressing table and sighed.

  “And how is Harriet?” she asked. “Rose mentioned there’d been some… tension between you.”

  Did she? El thought.

  She’d been telling herself that the strained atmosphere that seemed to settle over the flat whenever she and Harriet were in it together was perceptible only to the two of them; that neither Rose nor Sophie had picked up on it.

  Evidently, she’d been wrong.

  “It’s fine,” she said, far more cheerfully than the situation had left her feeling. “It’s just what happens when you’re cooped up with someone too long with nowhere to go.” She bit, absently, at the skin around the nail bed of her left thumb - a nervous habit she’d developed, for the first time in her life, over the preceding weeks. “I didn’t tell Rose I was coming,” she added. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  It had been uncomfortable, lying to Rose about her whereabouts that afternoon - not least since Sophie, after cornering her by the front door of the flat as she was leaving, had made it clear that both she and Rose knew that El’s excuse about going down to Oxford Street to do some shopping had been a fabrication, but had mutually decided not to press the issue.

  (“You’re broke, and you hate shopping,” Sophie had said, more exasperated than any fourteen year-old child had any right to sound. “I mean, come on. You weren’t even trying”).

  Sita, however, had insisted that El’s visit be kept secret from the others: not only Rose but Karen and Kat, too. And, to El’s surprise, Ruby.

  “I’m sorry to have to ask, darling,” Sita replied, pouring hot tea from the pot into the cups and drowning it in milk. “It’s terribly cloak-and-dagger, isn’t it? But I thought it might be best, given Auntie Ruby’s… state of mind.”

  She had a point. In the three days that had passed since Hannah D’Amboise had hurled herself back into their lives and ushered in an entirely new raft of problems for them, Ruby’s behaviour had been decidedly odd.

  She’d been far too quiet, for one thing. Sharp as she was, and while she was never less than five steps ahead of everyone else - including El, at times, as infuriating as that could be - Ruby was rarely given to introspection, much less to brooding. But there was no better word than brooding for the way she’d been acting, since Hannah had left them at the Chelsea house - to let them think things over, as she’d put it, before they decided how to proceed.

  (“I’d think quickly, though,” she’d said, throwing the final rejoinder their way as she’d stepped out onto the pavement outside, still cradling her injured and by then visibly swollen jaw in one hand. “It’s a terrible cliché, I know, but you really are in terrible danger, the lot of you. Which means that I am. And I really do hate that”).

  What Ruby had said when she had spoken, moreover, had not gone over well with the rest of them.

  “We’ll have to do it,” she’d told them, once Hannah had gone. “I don’t like it any more than I expect you lot will, but she’s right: we need her, if we’re gonna find a way around this.”

  “Need her?” Karen had replied - more shocked than angry, at least then. “What would we need her for? Even if it’s true, what she’s saying - and it probably isn’t, ‘cause she’s a lying bitch - then we don’t need her around to sort it out, do we? If we really are in the shit, then we can get ourselves out of it a lot quicker without the fucking spawn of Satan along for the ride.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve got to agree with Karen.” This had been Rose, breaking free of El’s grip and walking over to Ruby, her tone placatory but resolute. “We can’t trust her. She’s a murderer; a sociopath, if you want my honest opinion. She’ll say and do anything, if it serves her own agenda. And we’ve no reason to believe that what she’s saying now is any more reliable than any of the other yarns she’s spun us in the past. Perhaps she has crossed paths with your sister, I don’t know - and perhaps she has managed to piss her off sufficiently to cause problems for herself. But there’s every chance that all of this is just her trying to use us to get her own back, somehow. For all we know, she took the money and torched El’s cottage herself as a convincer.”

  “No.” Ruby had shaken her head. “No. You don’t know our Dolly. All that, what that Hannah just said - I can believe it. Believe it of Dolly, anyhow.”

  “And she was how old when you saw her last?” Karen had challenged her. “Thirteen? Going on sixty years ago?”

  “She’s my sister. Some things you just know.”

  “Alright,” Sita had said. “Let’s say she’s telling the truth about that - about your sister. Let’s say she is some sort of… assassin for hire. We can’t be sure that any of the rest of it - that business with Marchant, for example - isn’t just something that Hannah plucked out of the air to reel us in, can we?”

  This had given Ruby pause. Sita rarely disagreed with her in front of the others, at least about anything strategic or logistical. As much as they bickered - and they bickered almost constantly - they were rarely less than a united front, when it came to the important stuff.

  “What do you suggest, then?” Ruby had asked. “We can’t just leave it and pretend she was never here. The money’s still gone, ain’t it? And if she is right, if she ain’t lying, then it’ll be more than just capital we stand to lose.”

  “That we do what we always do, before we commit to a plan. We do our research. At least some of what she said must be verifiable, surely? Madera’s connection to Marchant, at the very least?”

  Sita hadn’t called her Dolly, El had noticed.

  “Karen,” she’d added, turning temporarily away from Ruby, “might you be able to put in some phone calls yourself this afternoon, i
f I make some of my own? Ask some questions? Perhaps even use that computer of yours to unearth any detail that might be… more difficult to find elsewhere?”

  “Yeah,” Karen had said, grudgingly, “alright. That’s all I’m doing, though: looking.”

  “That’s fine. More than fine. Now, do you have it with you, the computer?”

  “I’ve got a laptop in my bag. Not sure how much use it’ll be if I’m not online, though.”

  “As luck would have it, I happen to know that this particular house is… how might you put it? Connected. One needs to be on the internet, apparently, if one wants to make a living out of writing romance. It’s all chatrooms and dating websites these days.”

  “That mean you want me to look now?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind? I suspect we’d all prefer to know where we stand now, while we’re all together, rather than wait it out in our respective boltholes. Then we’ll be equipped to actually make a decision.”

  Kat, who’d been so quiet for so much of the afternoon, had looked sharply up at them, her gaze finally leaving her own two hands.

  “And then what?” she’d said. “Let’s say Karen goes off and does her digging, and it turns out this Madera is after us ‘cause she thinks we’ve got the police onto her… what are you saying we should do about it? Just throw in with the bitch and tell her everything’s forgiven if she’ll help us out? ‘Cause I’ve got to say,” she lowered her gaze to her legs, to the walking stick propped up beside her chair, “I’m not sure I’m feeling quite so forgiving as you lot seem to be.”

  “Rose isn’t happy,” El said. “She’ll go along with it, I think. But she doesn’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Sita replied. “And I do hate to sound so ominous, but I have a terribly bad feeling about the whole business. A terribly bad feeling.”

  “She’s not lying,’ Karen had told them - obviously disgruntled by the conclusion she’d been forced to draw, once she and Sita had made their calls and done their digging. “Not about Marchant and Madera, anyway. Madera did do some work for him, by all accounts - the heavy stuff, the sort of shit he couldn’t pass along to anyone else. And I hate to say it, but it looks like that bitch Hannah really was in L.A. a couple of months back. Stayed three nights at a five-star place in West Hollywood - reserved the suite for a week, but bought herself a last-minute ticket back to Heathrow and left after three nights. Flew Economy, as well, which really isn’t her bag, so you’d best believe she took off in a hurry.”

  “And Gerry Adler confirmed, I’m afraid,” Sita had added, “that he’d heard a rumour of an American man asking after him. He wouldn’t say who told him, and I’m not sure at all that he’s been given very many more details than he gave to me - though I swear, that whole department of his has the structural integrity of a leaking bucket - but it does rather seem as if this Lucian Carruthers might have been poking his nose around Scotland Yard, after all.”

  Ruby had winced.

  “That’s it, then, ain’t it?” she’d murmured. “We’re gonna have to bring her in, somehow - Hannah, I mean. At least until we work out what to do about our Dolly.”

  There’d been a scraping of metal and a thump of rubber on tile as Kat had picked up her walking stick and pulled herself up from her chair, leaning into the cane for support.

  “I’m going to assume,” she’d said, slowly, “that that last bit was just you doing your thinking out loud, and not you saying you want to bring her back into the fold.”

  “I don’t see no other way ‘round this one,” Ruby had answered her, voice as soft and distant as it had been when Hannah had begun to tell her story. “If our Dolly’s really after us, we’re gonna need every scrap of information we can get on her and whatever crew she’s running. Even if we don’t much like where it comes from.”

  “Think so, do you? ‘Cause you know, I’m not so sure we do. Maybe it’s the brain damage talking, but it seems to me that there might be potential for it to be a little bit of an own goal, relying on the word of an actual fucking psychopath.”

  “What she says she’s got on Madera,” Karen had said, with more than a hint of an apology. “All the stuff she paid people to find - it’d take me weeks to get to it. Longer even, maybe. And it doesn’t sound like we’ve got that sort of time, you know what I mean? Plus, she’s actually met Madera, actually talked to her up close - her and this Carruthers bloke. Met her recently, I should say,” she’d added, her eyes darting towards Ruby's.

  “Think I give a shit about that, do you, after what that cow did to me? She comes running back here, tail between her legs, and says there’s some great scary Terminator who might be after us, and it’s enough to get you lot tripping over yourselves to break out the welcome mat… meanwhile, you all seem to have forgotten that she tried to fucking kill me herself, not so long ago. Right now, you can say what you like, but there’s a big fuck-off question mark over this Madera and what she might be after. Whereas I know what Hannah is, see. ‘Cause I was there, wasn’t I, when she put a hole through my head. So at this moment, if you asked me which of them I’d be more worried about, if it came right down to it… it’s her. Hannah.”

  Ruby had listened in silence to everything Kat had said. But when she spoke, El at least had known that she was finished arguing the toss.

  “It’s happening,” she’d said. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t agree with it, and you know this ain’t how I like to play things… but it’s happening. It’s got to happen. ‘Cause like I said: I know our Dolly. And if she’s the same now as she was back then - the same, but better at it - then really, I promise you: we’re gonna need every tiny little bit of help we can get.”

  “What do you want to do about it, then?” El asked. “I’m guessing you want to do something, or you wouldn’t have told me to come out here like this.”

  Sita looked positively pained.

  “I wish I knew, darling,” she said. “To be perfectly honest, a part of me had hoped that you might have some thoughts of your own on how we might proceed. As things stands, I’m a little concerned we may be flying headlong into some rather serious trouble.”

  “Ruby hasn’t told you what she wants to do, if we manage to track down Madera?”

  “She hasn’t told me anything. All she’ll say is that we need to find her. What she imagines we’ll do once we’ve found her… it’s something of a mystery.”

  “You think she agrees with Hannah? About, you know… having to kill her?”

  Sita shook her head.

  “No,” she said, emphatically. “Perhaps she’s decided it’s in all of our interests to intimate to that woman that she does. But your Auntie Ruby - she isn’t a killer. Whatever else you may think of her, I can absolutely assure you that she doesn’t have it in her.”

  El thought back to the scene in Rose’s kitchen, the year before last: Marchant dead on the floor, a bloody trench dug from the place where his throat had been, and Ruby crouching over him, a knife in her hand.

  “She doesn’t have it in her,” Sita repeated - performing the mind-reading trick she and Ruby so often practised in El’s company. “Whatever she might have done before… it wasn’t premeditated. Oh, she’ll defend herself when she has to - and defend the people around her, for that matter. She’d mow down a thousand James Marchants before she’d see harm come to you or Rose or the boys. But she’d never knowingly plan a death. It isn’t her way. Especially not when…”

  “When it’s her sister’s death she’d be planning?” El guessed.

  “Quite. Yes.”

  El finished her tea; took a few seconds to frame the question - the statement - she’d been dying to pose for the last three days.

  “You didn’t know she had a sister,” she said carefully. “She never told you."

  “No,” Sita replied. “No, she never did.”

  “And her mum and dad? Did you know about them?”

  “About what happened to them in the war - the way they died? Yes, of cours
e. We haven’t spoken of it often - it isn’t something one dwells on, the loss of a parent - but I knew.”

  El, who’d lost her own mother when she was barely older than Ruby had been the night hers had failed to come home, found she had little to say in response.

  We’re orphans, she told herself. The whole lot of us, bar Karen. Me, and Rose, and Kat. Even Hannah.

  Not a single, solitary parent between us.

  And now Ruby, too. Ruby, all along.

  Is it any wonder we managed to find each other? That we manage to keep finding each other?

  “What do you think she thinks?” she asked eventually. “About finding her again - her sister. Thea. Dolly. Whoever she is.”

  Sita took El’s cup from her hand and replaced it on the tray, along with her own.

  “I’ve known your Auntie Ruby a very long time. A very, very long time.”

  “And?”

  “And in all that time, I’ve never known her to be in need of anything - emotionally speaking. Some people, when they’ve suffered a loss… it’s as if something of them is missing. As if there’s a hollow - an echoing space, somewhere inside them.”

  People like me, El thought. Or people like I used to be, maybe. Before Ruby and Sita. Before Rose.

  “Auntie Ruby, though,” Sita continued, “she isn’t one of them. Never has been one of them. If she hadn’t told me herself, I’m not sure I’d ever have guessed that she’d lost a parent, let alone both of them in one fell swoop.”

  “Okay.”

  “What I’m trying to get at it is: I don’t know what she thinks, about this lost sister. She’s… well, a black box, frankly. A closed book. And between us: I’m finding that almost as frightening, under the circumstances, as the threat of Madera herself.”