Читать книгу The Girl Who Had No Fear - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 12

‘You just keep a lookout,’ George told Aunty Sharon, shouting above the gusting Cambridgeshire wind. Her pulse thudded in her neck as she calculated how long it would take Sally Wright to grind and wobble her way up the hill to the student house on the Huntingdon Road. Surely a chain-smoker like her would asphyxiate before she’d be able to scale Cambridge’s infamous Castle Hill on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle. Calm down, George. Chill your boots. You get in. You get out. You get gone. ‘I’ll be down in ten. I’ve only got a couple of bits to get. Honk if you see an angry white woman with a bad fringe. Okay? Honk!’

This was a flying visit to Cambridge, precipitated by two texts she had received the evening she had returned to Aunty Sharon’s after interviewing Gordon Bloom in Belmarsh. Relieved to find that she was not, after all, being followed through the Catford backstreet by anything more sinister than an inquisitive cat and her own burgeoning paranoia, she had hastened to her aunt’s house, walking straight through to the kitchen. She had put her bag squarely on a kitchen chair, so it had aligned with the edges. Rearranging it until it was just right. The routine had been like every other evening.

‘All right, love,’ Aunty Sharon had said. ‘I’ve made goat curry. Fancy it?’ She had lifted the lid on a simmering pan, the contents of which had smelled like heaven but had resembled diarrhoea. George had embraced her aunt, barely circling her chunky middle. Had kissed her on the cheek, feeling whiskers that hadn’t been there twelve months earlier. But at least Aunty Sharon had ditched the raggedy extensions and had covered her desperately stressed natural hair with a decent wig.

Beneath her apron, Sharon had already been wearing her clothes for the club, where she served watered-down shots to the pissed denizens of Soho’s Skin Licks titty bar.

‘Oh my days, Aunty Shaz! I could eat a scabby horse on toast. I only had a bag of cheese balls all day. Bring it on. It smells bloody gorgeous.’ George had flung herself onto another kitchen chair, contemplating how empty the house had felt with her cousin, Tinesha, long departed to live with her boyfriend, and Patrice who was more out than in, now that he was in the upper sixth. Once again, George – past the point where she had been the fresh young thing, out on the tiles all night long and now having reached the age where her contemporaries were married with children – had only her own company to look forward to, as the evening had stretched ahead of her. Hadn’t one of the new male Fellows at college jokingly referred to George as a spinster? Some long-legged floppy-haired arsehole in a pseudo-intellectual tweed jacket, originally from Eton. Tim Hamilton. Dickhead. He’d stared at her tits when he’d said it. George had batted the thought aside. ‘You go to the community centre today? Any news?’

Sharon had shaken her head and had plonked too much rice onto a plate with a giant serving spoon. ‘Nah, love. Nobody’s seen her. Nobody’s heard nothing on the grapevine. Not a fucking sausage. Even that nosey old cow Dorothea Caines didn’t have a clue, and I had to eat one of her rock-hard cupcakes to find that much out.’ She had put her hand on her hip and had grimaced. ‘She’d not sieved the flour. Can you get over it? I mean!’ She’d made a harrumphing noise. ‘Talk about taking one for the team. My God! If the Black Gang or Pecknarm Killaz or whatever the fuck those gangsta rarseclarts call themselves used her cupcakes as missiles, all there’d be left of Southeast London would be fucking craters. Craters, darling!’

Nodding, George had forked her curry into her mouth with the enthusiasm of the semi-starving. Surreptitiously grabbing at her spare tyre beneath the table, thinking it time she had a chat with Aunty Sharon about portion size, now there were fewer of them in the house.

Sharon had been unaware of George’s dietary preoccupation. She had been waving the spoon at her with dangerous intent. ‘I’d take that Dorothea Caines out like a fucking ninja if we was going head-to-head in a bake-off.’ Droplets of curry had spattered the dated splashback tiles.

‘So, still no news of Letitia. Or my dad?’ George had asked, feeling irritation prickle at the roots of her hair. Same questions. Every. Single. Day.

Her aunty had fallen abruptly quiet, sniffing pointedly. Her eyes had become glassy without warning. ‘Sorry, love. If anyone had seen your mum knocking around on the estate, that do-gooding righteous witch Dorothea would be the first to hear it and crow about it. Honest. Your mum’s evaporated into thin air, like.’ She had reached out and had grabbed George’s hand, squeezing it in a show of solidarity. ‘Nothing on your dad, either.’

Noticing the curry and grains of rice stuck to Sharon’s index finger, George had pulled her hand away, stifling a sigh.

As she had crawled into Tinesha’s old bed and had pulled the duvet up to her chin, she had thought about this impasse she had reached. An unwelcome tear had tracked along her cheekbone, running into her ear. Annoyed, she had poked at it, wondering if Letitia had been thinking about her; if she had even still been alive.

‘Like fuck she is,’ she had said to floral curtains, backlit by the yellow streetlight.

She had wondered yet again if there had been even the slightest possibility that her father had sent the untraceable emails, courting contact with her; saying he was watching her.

‘Not after nearly twenty-five years of silence. No way,’ she had told the glowing numbers on the old ticking alarm clock.

With sleep beckoning her towards yet another fitful night of tossing, turning and imagining the gruesome fate of her possibly enucleated mother, she had been jolted wide awake by her phone vibrating with two new emails. The first had been from Marie.

Police in Maastricht have found a man who may be of interest!

The second had been from Van den Bergen.

Come back to Amsterdam. I need you for something.

Now, Aunty Sharon was wedged behind the wheel of her old 53-plate Toyota Corolla, parked badly on Huntingdon Road, peering up with a puzzled look at the tired Gothic student house that loomed above them. Yellowing chintz curtains at the window and a broken pane of glass in the 1960s replacement front door.

‘You live here?’ she asked, curling her lip with clear disgust. ‘In that dump? You having a laugh with me?’

George frowned. Shook her head dismissively and tutted. ‘Save it, yeah? Beggars can’t be choosers. Now remember. If you see Sally Wright—’

‘What about Sally Wright?’ Sally Wright asked, emerging from behind the overgrown privet that bordered the end-of-terrace. She clapped her hands together in George’s face. ‘Ha! Got you, you sneaky sod!’

Opening and closing her mouth, George foraged in her mental lie-box for a good, feasible excuse as to why she had kept her flying visit to Cambridge a secret. Tried to work out how the aerobically challenged Senior Tutor had hoofed it from her office in St John’s College up the road to the house inside ten minutes. Ten goddamned minutes since Aunty Shaz’ car had rolled into town.

‘How—?’

‘Sophie Bartek,’ Sally explained, marching to the taxi that George had only just clocked, parked all the while in front of Aunty Sharon. She explained to the driver that she had decided to hitch a ride back in Sharon’s Toyota, paid him and sent him on his way.

‘Fucking Sophie,’ George said under her breath. ‘Shit-stirrer owes me one.’

She forced a smile for the Professor of Criminology who ruled her academic life like a benevolent dictator; the woman she would always be indebted to for having allowed her to learn her way out of a future where petty crime or prison or stacking supermarket shelves would otherwise have beckoned.

‘Why haven’t you been taking my calls, young lady?’ Sally asked, glowering at George. Pointing with a gnarled, amber-coloured finger. ‘It’s our bloody book launch tomorrow evening, and Sophie tells me you’re buggering back off to Amsterdam.’ She folded her arms across her narrow chest, squeezing the leather of her eccentrically cut coat until she was akin to a municipal bin bag with the drawstrings pulled tight. The pruning around her mouth deepened. But that fierce gaze had lost none of its potency behind the red acetate cat’s-eye glasses. ‘I’ll never be able to show my face in Heffers again. And all because you can’t resist the pull of that old flake, Van den Bergen. The man’s like a disappointing Svengali with prostate trouble. Our big night will be ruined. Now, what do you have to say for yourself?’

‘You don’t need me to help you blow your fucking trumpet in public, Sally. You’ve got that one covered all on your own, I reckon.’ George didn’t like being indebted. And apologies were overrated. She jammed her fist onto her hip defiantly. ‘And Paul is hardly a flake, is he? He’s one of the best coppers in Europe, actually. And if you must know, I’m going to Amsterdam because there’s been a development regarding Letitia.’

‘What?!’ Aunty Sharon shouted from inside the Toyota.

‘What?!’ Sally Wright said, clutching George’s arm.

George pulled herself loose from the grip of the Senior Tutor. Immediately regretted saying anything, as her aunt unbuckled and started to heave herself out of the car.

‘Georgina, why on earth didn’t you say anything?’ Sally said, her brow furrowed, perhaps with genuine empathy.

Before George could retreat, Sharon had rounded on them both, booting Sally Wright aside unceremoniously with her ample bottom. She clasped George into a suffocating hug. The threat of tears audible in her voice.

‘Is she dead?’ Sharon asked. ‘Has that silly cow’s body been found in a wheelie bin?’ She sniffed hard. ‘It has, hasn’t it? Oh, sweet Jesus.’

‘I won’t know anything until I speak to Marie, one of Paul’s detectives,’ George said, disengaging herself from her aunt. ‘All I know is that there’s a man in Maastricht. A dead guy, who’s somehow connected to Letitia’s disappearance. That’s all she’s told me so far.’ She turned to the Senior Tutor, realising it would do her no favours to curry the displeasure of a woman who could have her funding rescinded at any time, leaving her broke and jobless. Sally had threatened it before, but George was older, wiser and several steps closer to having a deposit saved for her own place, now. Biting this particular gnarled proverbial hand that fed would be folly. ‘That’s why I can’t stay for the launch, Sal.’ She rearranged her features into what would pass as an apologetic smile. ‘You’ll be brilliant without me.’

Sally tugged at her blunt-cut fringe and scowled. Hooked her short bob behind her ear. ‘But all of Dobkin’s family are coming. It’s a big deal, dedicating the book to his memory.’

‘We robbed his research,’ George said. ‘I could have saved his life and I didn’t. I knew Danny was up to no good and all I could think of was protecting my own arse.’ George’s viscera tightened at the memory of her squatting behind a car, watching her academic rival, Professor Dickwad Dobkin, succumb to the brutal intentions of her backstreet drug-dealing ex-lover. UCL’s finest criminologist crumpling to the ground like a falling autumnal leaf in a quiet London WC1 square, all because he had got too close to revealing the true identities of the major players in the UK’s people-trafficking rings. A bullet, punching its way into his superlative brain, that could have been avoided, had George only been quicker to punch his number into her phone. ‘I don’t deserve to have my name on the front of that book.’

Sally’s mouth hardened to a thin line. ‘We did not steal his research, Georgina McKenzie. Dobkin’s trafficking database and the information we … you gathered from inmates in prison developed organically under completely separate—’

‘His research made it into our book,’ George said, feeling shame heat her wind-chilled cheeks from the inside. Nervously looking at Aunty Sharon, expecting a look of disapprobation but seeing only confusion in her face.

‘What’s some geez in Maastricht gotta do with my turd of a sister?’ Sharon asked.

‘It’s going to be a Sunday Times bestseller,’ Sally said, pulling a cigarette packet out of her coat pocket. She offered one to George. George shook her head but took one anyway.

Sharon, clearly unimpressed by the interloper snatching George’s attention in this time of family crisis, shouted at the Senior Tutor, ‘Mout a massy, yuh cyan shut yup?’ Jamaican patois, delivered with such venom and speed that George was convinced the paving slabs of that genteel Cambridge road might blister at any moment. Sharon snatched the cigarette off George and lit it herself. ‘Listen, Professor whatever-your name is,’ she said, exhaling a cloud of blue-grey smoke in Sally’s direction. ‘If my niece here stands a cat in hell’s chance of tracking my sister down – who’s been missing for a fucking year …’ Jabbing the cigarette towards the startled Fellow. ‘… she’s going to Amsterdam if I have to put on bloody water wings and swim her there, myself. Right? And if that means you can’t roll her out at your fucking boring book launch as some novelty ghetto-fabulous lackey what serves the cooking wine and flutters her eyelashes at the dirty old codgers who pay your wages, you’re just going have to suck it up, darling! Cos family comes first. Right?’ She turned to George, straightening her burgundy, glossy wig. Glowing with an almost religious zeal that only Bermondsey women could really pull off when vexed. ‘Get your shit together, love. We’re going to the airport.’ A click of the fingers meant the conversation was over.

Dropping Sally Wright off outside St John’s College, leaving her open-mouthed and speechless, for once, George realised she was trembling with anticipation. Would this trip yield an answer to her questions? She covered her juddering hands with her rucksack. Not quick enough for her aunt, though.

‘I see you shaking there, like you’ve got the DTs! It would help if you ate a proper breakfast,’ she said, indicating left. Pulling up at the drop-off point at Stansted Airport, forcing the dented silver car into a bottleneck of taxis and disoriented relatives who were also dropping baggage-laden holidaymakers at Departures. Sharon reached for a cool bag at George’s feet.

‘Shift your feet. I made you a packed lunch,’ she said. Plonked the bag onto George’s lap. Grabbing her face and planting a wet kiss on her cheek, which George hastily wiped away. ‘Couple of nice homemade patties and some jerk chicken. That’ll keep you going for a bit.’

‘Ta. I love you, Aunty Shaz.’ George drank in the detail of her aunt’s face, feeling suddenly melancholy. She pushed aside unexpectedly negative feelings that she couldn’t quite articulate. A sense of impending loss or perhaps just separation anxiety. ‘Give my love to Tin and Patrice. I’ll text you.’

Aunty Sharon nodded. Her face, scrubbed of the make-up she wore to the club in the evening, seemed closer to five than forty.

‘Find her, George. Find Letitia, dead or alive.’