The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Read online

  She gestured as evidence to the faint grey-green circles under her eyes; the touch of pallor on her already pale skin. Both were covered, proficiently, with what El recognised as very expensive, if not quite industrial-grade foundation.

  “You look great,” El said, and immediately wished she hadn’t - aware of the weight of the words, the heft, however innocuous they’d seemed before she’d said them aloud.

  This was the other problem with Rose - the reason she’d hesitated, momentarily, when Rose had invited her out for a catchup. There was a degree of awkwardness between them that hadn’t been there when they’d worked together the previous year, one El attributed entirely to Ruby and Sita and their interference - to the persistent and poorly-concealed attempts they’d made over the last few months to bring Rose and El together, romantically.

  Ruby and Sita were many things to El: friends, mentors, self-appointed fairy godmothers. They were family in all but blood, de facto aunts and co-conspirators de jure. They’d trained her; they’d made her. To Rose, they were more besides - in a very literal sense, she owed them her life.

  And they were devious, wily - clever old birds, as Ruby herself so often put it. Any length of time in their company and you found yourself playing the mark in a particularly well-oiled game of Find The Lady, studying the rapid-fire movements of their hands for clues only to discover later that the card you’d been looking for wasn’t up Ruby’s sleeve or tucked away in Sita’s handbag, the way you’d expected, but glued to the ceiling or clipped to the collar of a neighbourhood cat.

  Sometimes there were benefits to this deviousness - as, for example, when they’d gifted El a substantial share of the £100m they’d acquired, surreptitiously, in the course of the last con they’d run together. But sometimes there were drawbacks. And the self-consciousness she now felt around Rose fell, she thought, very firmly into this latter category.

  “Thank you,” said Rose, with what seemed to El artificial lightness. “It’s very kind of you to say so.”

  El considered her follow-up gambit - casting around for the question or statement that might guide them into safer waters and coming up empty. It came as a relief when the commotion reached their table, breaking the silence: male voices, low-pitched but resonant, speaking over one another in the kind of restrained disagreement that might rapidly abandon its restraint in a less public setting.

  Rose cocked her head towards the sound.

  “Is that who I think it is?” she asked after a moment, looking to El for confirmation.

  El listened, picking up one word in three of what seemed to be an argument over access: one man demanding to be let into the restaurant, the second denying him entry in the absence of a valid booking.

  The second man was the maître’d’; had to be.

  The first was Dexter: Ruby’s son and - along with Michael, his identical twin - the closest thing El had ever had to a brother.

  “It’s him,” she told Rose, confused.

  The voices came louder, closer to their table, and then Dexter was lurching towards them, the angry maître’d’ at his shoulder. He was, El thought, markedly underdressed for someone so wedded to bespoke tailoring - the too-tight polo shirt, the denim cut-offs and the sheen of sweat on his forehead giving him the look, not of a moneyed professional on the hunt for high-end Mediterranean cuisine, but of a gym-goer who’d opted to forgo the shower after a tough workout.

  Patches of dark maroon, only half-dried, stained the white ironed cotton of the polo shirt from neck to stomach. Worse still was his expression - a wide-eyed panic completely at odds with his usual insouciance.

  “I tried to call,” he said, the smooth posh-boy baritone he dialled up for clients and solicitors for the prosecution sounding scratched and raw. “Both of you, on your mobiles. But I couldn’t get through, and Sita said I’d find you here…”

  “I turned mine off,” said El automatically.

  They’ve got her, she thought. The police have got Ruby. I don’t know what they’ve found on her, or what they’ve got her for - but they’ve got her.

  Then: how did Sita know we’d be here?

  “Is it Ruby?” Rose asked him, before El could speak, sounding every bit as panicked as he looked. “Dexter, is it Ruby? Has something happened to her?”

  Dexter’s brow creased in confusion, as if the possibility of something - anything - happening to his mother hadn’t occurred to him.

  “No,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “No. Not Mum - Michael. Michael’s been stabbed.”

  Chapter 2

  West Hampstead, London

  June 1997

  It began with potatoes, of all things.

  Michael, who’d offered that morning to make dinner, had wanted plain Maris Pipers, parboiled then roasted with sea salt and a sprig of rosemary; Dexter, who fancied himself the more creative and competent chef, had petitioned for the deep-fried dum aloo he’d been hoping to sample since seeing it brought to life on a cooking show the week before.

  They’d squabbled in the kitchen while the oven heated, Michael refusing to put down the peeler and Dexter transferring oils and fenugreek seeds from the spice rack to the tabletop with passive-aggressive certitude. But the potatoes quickly gave way to other bubbling grievances - Dexter’s over-use of the hot water, Michael’s hoarding of the ironing board - which gave way in turn to the deeper ideological disagreement that had divided them since they were students: what Dexter saw as Michael’s excessive caution and conservatism, and what Michael regarded as Dexter’s dangerously freewheeling approach to being-in-the-world.

  “I find it hard to believe,” Michael had said, in reference to the woman whom Dexter had brought back to the flat late one night the week before and tried, but failed, to smuggle out unseen the following morning, “that even you would be so irresponsible, when the whole purpose of this enterprise was to fly under the radar. Do you even want to keep Mum safe?”

  It had seemed a good idea, when they’d signed the lease. Ruby, only just back from a cooling-off period up north after a job gone bad, would temporarily give up her flat in Edgware and move with the boys to a bigger, mansion house duplex in West Hampstead, one owned by a contact of Dexter’s - a cannabis importer who’d elected, sensibly, to relocate to São Paulo before any arrest warrants could be issued. There, like Rose and Sophie in their penthouse, Ruby would be protected, not only by the presence of her sons but by the high electric gates and CCTV camera monitoring the building on all sides. Should anyone come looking for her, as both boys feared they might, she’d be far from the home she’d once vowed to leave only when she was carried out in a body bag - and neither alone nor vulnerable.

  The plan’s success, however, relied on two things. First, that all three of them were discreet, disclosing their new address only to their closest circles - a commitment with which Dexter particularly had struggled. And second, that neither brother killed the other before anyone else got the chance.

  This too had proven a challenge.

  It was a long-standing source of amusement for those who knew them, the differences in the twins’ personalities - Michael’s seriousness, professional good standing and reputation for incorruptibility the diametric opposite of Dexter’s nonchalance, his moral flexibility. They’d qualified together, completing law degrees and training contracts in the same town at the same time - but from there their paths had diverged, Michael’s leading him to commercial litigation and the City, and Dexter’s to a discreet two-room practice on the Strand with a small, specialist client list to whom he offered a range of dedicated if somewhat unorthodox services.

  (“Straight as a die and bent as a nine-bob note,” as their mother put it - in both cases, with a flush of pride).

  But what had been entertaining for both men from the vantage point of separate apartments was less so at a distance of ten feet or less, and - much as they’d tried to hide it from their mother - the fraternal relationship was straining at the seams.

  “I have to
live,” Dexter had said, banging a jar of asafoetida onto the counter with unnecessary force. “Bitch all you like, but I’m not prepared to retire to the monastery quite yet. Mum doesn’t expect that, and neither should you.”

  “You can do all the living you want. Just don’t do it here.”

  “So you don’t have to think about what you’re missing?”

  This hit home, as Dexter had known it would. Michael’s girlfriend, a Big Six accountant as strait-laced as Michael himself, had cut and run unexpectedly that Easter - packing up her things and transporting them from their house in Balham to a new one-bed in Limehouse while he was away on a late-season skiing trip with work, and leaving him to return from Chamonix to a home absent of furniture and a lone set of keys bunched forlornly by the answerphone.

  (“She didn’t leave him for anyone,” Dexter told El when it happened. “She just… left him. Absolutely tragic. So much worse for his self-esteem than if there’d been someone else”).

  Michael hadn’t answered him directly, but had thrown him a look of wounded anger before stalking out of the kitchen and then, or so the sound of the front door slamming suggested, out of the flat and into the communal hallway.

  Dexter had been gleeful, revelling in his victory. Until he heard it: a ferocious, echoing bellow, so loud it was practically in the flat, followed almost immediately by a gasp, a sharp intake of breath and the sound of heavy footfall hitting the stairs, moving downwards.

  He’d been on high alert all year, since the business with his mother and the dead man on Rose’s kitchen floor, but the sound alarmed him regardless, and he ran for the door, yanking it open with such force that it slammed against the wall as it swung inwards.

  And there was Michael, curled on the doorstep like an unwanted parcel - his eyes rolled back into his head with nothing but the sclera showing, blood staining the faded Cloud Cheetah apron Dexter had brought him for their thirtieth birthday and one crabbed hand clutching at the place on his ribs where he’d been stabbed.

  “He’ll be alright,” Dexter told them, as they followed him from the restaurant to his car - a new one, El noticed, a black Range Rover rather than the Jaguar E-Type he’d been driving the last time she’d seen him. “He lost blood, quite a lot of it, but the cuts were shallow. It was a very amateur job, or so Barbara Potter says.”

  Barbara Potter, El knew, was a nurse: a former Ward Sister at the Royal Free Hospital, now retired, and another node in the wide-ranging obligation network of friends, associates and occasional enemies through which Ruby and Sita got done the things they judged to need doing. Her husband, Terry, had been a respected antiques dealer, an authority on 19th century European glassware, and Ruby’s go-to fence for much of the ‘80s; since his death, Barbara had brought in a little extra income patching up the minor workplace injuries of the friendlier end of the South East underworld, and of anyone else who’d rather not - for their own reasons, reasons she would never probe - take themselves to A&E for a couple of stitches and a tetanus shot.

  Since Barbara refused unreservedly to minister to any patient she judged to require more intensive care than that she could provide in their living room, it was fair to assume, if Ruby had called her in, that Michael really was alright.

  But still, Dexter looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “You didn’t want to get him checked out properly?” Rose asked, opening the door of the Range Rover and climbing up into the back seat.

  “He didn’t want to,” said Dexter, slightly defensively, pulling himself up into the driving seat. “He thought admitting himself to hospital with a stab wound might draw attention - to Mum, not just to us. And he was perfectly lucid, so I wasn’t about to argue.”

  Rose didn’t reply.

  It’s guilt, El thought. A year later, and she still feels guilty for what happened - for what Ruby and the boys had to do.

  Rationally, Rose had told her - late one Saturday night in January, when she’d called to notify El of Ruby’s return from Rotherham and they’d spent two straight hours on the phone, a conversation that was neither therapy nor courtship but had a little of the flavour of both - she knew that she wasn’t directly to blame for what Ruby had done, that day in the Notting Hill house. Or for what Sita had done, when she’d asked Michael and Dexter to dispose of the body Ruby had left behind when she’d stepped up to defend the rest of them.

  But Rose had orchestrated the take-down of her father, had set in motion the events that brought about his death - and the involvement in the cover-up of Ruby and Michael and Dexter that its circumstances had demanded. And these events had led, ultimately, to the escape and disappearance of the probably vengeful and certainly volatile woman who now hovered on the peripheries of all of their lives like a coming storm - their Moriarty, unseen but no less unsettling for it. That made her, Rose reasoned, at least partly responsible for where many of them had ended up - for the fear that had driven them to change addresses, go underground, invest in ever more elaborate security measures.

  El hoisted herself into the back seat beside her, considering the best way to phrase her next few sentences. She knew Dexter, the parts that worried her as well as the parts that made her smile and want to pull him into a hug - and the way he seemed now, his reaction to what had happened to Michael, was guiding her towards a question that was, and she was aware would seem to him, more rhetorical than it was enquiring.

  “Dex,” she began carefully, “do you know who it was, that stabbed him?”

  He didn’t answer immediately - took time, instead, to start the engine, angle the blunt nose of the Range Rover away from the pavement before accelerating forward into the oncoming traffic of Carlton Hill.

  “Yes,” he replied eventually.

  “Was it someone you know?” she pushed, glad she couldn’t see his face from where she was sitting. “A client, maybe?”

  But he knew her as well as she knew him, knew she’d never intentionally shame him or press him into a corner, and it wasn’t anger or self-justification she heard in his voice when he answered - just the flat contrition of a man naming his sins in confession.

  “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid,” he said. “It was someone who thought I was Michael. Or someone, rather, who thought Michael was me.”

  Chapter 3

  Saffron Walden, Essex

  May 1997

  There had to be thirty machines in the hangar: saloons and 4x4s, box-fresh GTs and restored American muscle cars, single-seater racers shaped like bullets and armoured trucks so insectile Dexter couldn’t fathom what purpose they might ever have served, on road or battlefield. And there were supercars, the kind that left his mouth watering and his fingers itching to grab for the steering wheel: a McLaren F1, orange as a Halloween pumpkin; a Porsche 911 Strassenversion, the chassis hanging dangerously close to the ground; a Dauer 962, high-winged and idiosyncratically yellow, that would on any other day have been the rarest model he’d ever laid eyes on.

  They were arranged side-by-side in a vast, petal-like semi-circle, the grille of each one pointed towards the centrepiece of the collection: a long, lean Bugatti Royale, black and white, the bonnet more than twice the size of the cockpit. He couldn’t pinpoint the year - somewhere between ’28 and ’32 was his best estimate - but was clearer on its price tag. Of the six Royales that Ettore Bugatti produced, he knew, only four had ever made it into circulation - and when one of those four went to auction in ’87, it had sold for upwards of £5m.

  He hadn’t been there on the day, but his Mum had, and he vividly recalled her reaction to being outbid; the foul mood she’d been in when he’d called round for lunch that Sunday. He’d found out later that she’d been planning to buy it for his Dad, for his sixty-fifth birthday, and remembered wondering at the time whether or not she’d crack and look for a way to divert it to her own lockup before it was spirited away to Rome or Tokyo or Jeddah by its new owner. But then his Dad’s first stroke had come along, taking his eyesight and with it his driving licen
ce, and the Royale had been all but forgotten.

  It was mounted on a raised platform built into the marble of the hangar’s grey floor, a slowly rotating disc twenty five feet across that treated the observer to alternating views of its large spare tyre and the dancing elephant rearing up on its hind legs from the radiator cap. Its dark body gleamed in the overhead lights. Dexter was awestruck.

  “Beautiful, innit?” said the man beside him, gesturing to the Royale with a moist pink hand loaded with sovereign rings.

  “How much did you pay for it?” Dexter asked. Ordinarily he’d have shied away from a question that direct - one that Sita, if not his Mum, would have denounced as vulgar, as beneath him. But he had to know; needed confirmation that he really was seeing what he thought he was seeing, that the Royale - unique though it was - was an asset like any other, a commodity exchangeable for hard cash or harder credit, and not a mirage, an optical illusion.

  Hartwood tapped his nose with one finger - a nose as pink and moist and unappetising as his hand.

  “That’s for me to know, mate,” he said, grinning at Dexter through capped, artificially white teeth. “For me to know and you to guess, ‘cause I ain’t telling.”

  Gary Hartwood had struck Dexter from the first as unusually unappealing in the flesh, more rat-faced than he’d seemed on the covers of the teen magazines he’d graced at the peak of his powers and far less charismatic than Dexter would have expected of a man who’d made his money, at least in the first instance, as the lead singer of a pop band. The band, Glamshell, had racked up eight Top 10 singles in the UK and Europe between 1984 and 1986, most of them to Dexter’s mind eminently forgettable - but had had the good sense to make one of them a Christmas song. Hartwood, Glamshell’s primary songwriter and sole owner of the publishing rights to its back catalogue, had reaped the royalties every January since.