Dispossession (26 page)

Here was the hallway, rising three storeys above us; and
there ahead was the front door, a massive job in oak and iron and another
reminder of my comparative rank here. We’d driven all around the house and
walked back through it, only because I didn’t have clout enough to rate the
front door. Or Dean didn’t think that I did.

Marble columns in the hall here, original floorboards worn
and warped with age, glowing dark with polish. Dean marched me across them,
tapped at a closed door half again as high and twice as wide as standard, and
pushed it open without waiting for a reply.

His head gestured me through first. I walked in obediently
and was vaguely conscious of his closing the door again behind us and then
staying there, standing probably with his back to it and his legs no doubt
apart and his arms I imagined folded like any cheap cliché of a watchful guard
in a situation of uncertainty, not knowing whether his companion is prisoner or
guest. He’d saved my life, I thought, and taken burns himself to do it, because
it was his job to do that, at that time. Things had changed somewhat, and might
change more. If they changed enough, I thought, Dean might take my life with no
more hesitation.

Ach, don’t be morbid, Jonty Marks. Get a grip, will you?
He’s not Mafia, even if he likes to pretend he is. And whatever reason could he
have to want to kill you, or Deverill to want you dead?

More questions, real or not, and I had no answers to those
either. Fine.
Let them go, worry when you need to.

Right now I had enough to worry about, in the way Vernon
Deverill was looking but not striding across this wide room to greet me, very
much not holding his hand out to a luncheon-guest in welcome.

The room had Regency paper on the walls, that might even
have been original; it had watercolours and oils that certainly were. I rather
thought the furniture was also, or some of it. A table and a sideboard
particularly might have been made two hundred years ago to stand just there,
and not have been moved since.

The leather-covered chairs around the fireplace were not so
old, though old enough for sure, cracked and worn and comfortable-looking. One
of them held a woman in her fifties, who held a glass in her hand and gazed at
me across the top of it, assessing, quite unforthcoming.

If that was a habit, it was catching. Deverill’s one hand
also held a glass, while his other fiddled in his jacket pocket; and his face
was as revealing as the windows of his limo as he gazed at me all down the
length of a sizeable Bokhara rug, and said, “I don’t think you were entirely
straight with me, son, last time we spoke.”

“Be fair, Mr Deverill,” I said, respectful but not
presumptuous, not “Vernon” now. “Would you have been? In the circumstances?”

“What circumstances are those, then?”

Sometimes, with some people, bullets are very much for
biting. “I was sore, I was scared, I was very confused; and in my business, in
this region, you’re pretty much public enemy number one, Mr Deverill. What am I
supposed to do, suddenly open my heart to someone whose agenda I can’t
understand, whose motives I have every reason to distrust?”

“A man in that position,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, not
at all challenging my definition of his own, “I’d have said you’d be glad to
trust someone.”

Yes, but not you.
And
not Suzie either; I’d run to Luke. Old bonds grip most tightly. But Deverill
actually sounded disappointed in me, let down that I hadn’t chosen him. I
almost wanted to say sorry. Maybe I was being manipulated here—
again
, my most private voice murmured—but I thought
this was genuine. There was something of a frustrated paterfamilias in him,
that sought the trust as well as the respect of those he let into his circle.
Big on loyalty, I thought he’d be; murder on betrayal.

“I needed time to think,” I said, grabbing a catch-all
defence, weak in the face of hurt. “If I’d told you straight out, ‘I’m sorry,
Mr Deverill, I can’t remember you or the job I’m doing for you,’ you’d have
given me no time at all, would you? You’d have told me to keep it that way, and
found someone else to do the work. I just had to stall you for a while, until I
could find out what was going on.”

He grunted. “So why did you run out on me, then? Why the
vanishing-act?”

If his ego was that big, that he saw my disappearance only
in terms of himself, I had no problem with pandering to it. “You’d have come
back next day, I figured, and I couldn’t have fooled you twice. You’d have
talked to the doctors by then, you’d know about the amnesia. And I don’t like
hospitals anyway, I wanted to be up and doing, trying to make sense of things.
Besides, someone had told me by then that you were paying for the room, and I
really didn’t want to be beholden to you any more than I was already.”

“My man saved your life,” he said neutrally.

“I know. I’ve not forgotten that.”

“Glad there’s something, then. How much else is there?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you know, about my business?”

I glanced at his other guest, the woman who sat listening,
absorbing everything, I thought, and giving nothing at all; and he said, “Don’t
be coy, boy. No secrets between us.”

“Fair enough, if you say so; but may I know who we’re
sharing your secrets with?”

“What? Don’t be... Oh.” His head turned between us, his gaze
went to her and back to me; and he said, “You don’t remember?”

“I’m sorry. No.”

“Well, then. For the second time of asking, this is my
ex-wife, Dorothy.”

Typical of him, I thought fleetingly, that definition: he’d
see everyone only in relation to himself. Or in ex-relation.

And it seemed that her mind tracked mine, because she rose to
her feet, held her hand out, and said, “Dorothy Tuck. I use my own name now.”

She would, I thought. Her handshake was firm and determined,
and so was her voice, and I thought neither one was deceptive. The only
surprise was that Deverill could or would still deal with her on this basis,
one-to-one and no secrets between them. He was a man I would have expected to
cut himself off from his failures.

She sat again, and looked at me expectantly. Fair enough, I
thought. In the circumstances, it was up to me to open.

“All I know,” I said, “is that you hired me to do a job for
you, which is something to do with finding out why Lindsey Nolan pinched all
that money and ran off to Spain.”

“He didn’t,” Deverill said. “He was set up. He’s too damn
clever to be that clumsy.”

“Okay, whatever. The other thing I know,” being brutally,
dangerously honest here, the only way to play it, “is that you’ve been paying
me far too much, whatever the job entails. And you’re not famous for your
open-handedness or for being an easy mark to rip off, so there’s some hidden
agenda here that I don’t understand. I also don’t understand why you picked me
for the job, whatever the job actually is; and I certainly don’t understand why
I ever said yes, why I quit my old firm to work for you.”

“You offered,” he said. “All this was your idea, none of it
came from me.”

Oh, God. That meant we really were in the shit. “Tell me
about it?” I suggested.

“Sit down, first. Have a drink,” and a gesture of his
fingers,
abracadabra
, turned Dean from
bodyguard to waiter. A minute later I had a heavy gin in my hand—no
consultation there, no
what would you like, Jonty?
;
Deverill drank gin at lunchtime, and therefore so did his guests—and I was
sitting, he was standing, starting to pace.

“You approached me,” he said. “Right out of the blue, I’d
never heard of you. You phoned my people, said you needed to talk to me about
matters that should be of concern to me. I thought that sounded like some kind
of blackmail threat, but I had you checked out, and everyone said you were just
this dead straight lawyer; so I said I’d meet you. Are you sure you don’t—?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Truly. Means nothing to me.”

“All right. But it feels...”

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, it’s pretty weird from my
side too.”

He grunted, getting his head—with an effort, I
thought—briefly around someone else’s point of view. Then, moving swiftly on,
“So we met, and
you
told
me
what I was sure of anyway, that Lindsey had
been set up. But you knew it for a fact, you said, though you couldn’t prove it
yet; and you thought you could get the proof, proof positive, you said, only to
do that you needed my help. You had to look corrupt, you said, or you’d never
get near them.”

“Hence the money?”

He nodded. “Hence the money. And you gave up your job, and spent
a lot of time just being seen with me. That’s what convinced me, I suppose,
more than anything: that you did set out to wreck your own career, very
publicly. You had to be serious then, unless you had a
very
fancy con job in your head.”

o0o

He was not wrong there. Very serious indeed, I must have
been. But why, about what?
To save my mother’s
life
was the only possible answer. I’d told her she was in danger;
presumably I was trying to protect her in some way I couldn’t currently fathom.

Would I do that? Would I lay down everything I had,
everything I’d worked for and everything I valued in my own life, because that
way I might just manage to preserve Ellie’s?

Well, yes. Put it like that, I would; and apparently I had,
though it felt very strange to think it.

I must have been looking pretty strange also, the minute or
so that I sat there, that the silence lasted. At any rate they were both
watching me by the time I dragged my eyeballs back into focus again, and both
seeming pretty amused.

“Have a drink,” he said. “Might help.”

“Uh, I’ve got one...”

“I know, but you’re not using it. Drink,” and he
demonstrated, taking a swig of his own; and yes, I did that too, I imitated
him. And yes, it did help, briefly. Fizz and tang, gin and lemon achingly cold
from the clinking ice; and a lump of ice slid into my mouth as I drank again,
and I sucked on that until it was nothing, and that helped too.

“So how much more did I tell you, Mr Deverill?”

“Bugger all,” he said.

“But if I was spending all that time with you, and you were
giving me all that money...”

He shrugged. “You said I had to trust you. You wouldn’t tell
me anything, not until you could prove it. Dot said you were taking me for a
ride, but...”

“Not necessarily that,” she said. “I was right, though, wasn’t
I? You should have insisted on being told. You’ve lost it now, both of you.
Unless that’s one thing you
can
remember,
Jonty? Who you were stalking?”

I shook my head, slowly. “Sorry,” I said, shifting from
truth to deception, not quite lying in my teeth but as near as dammit. “That’s
all gone, too.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Deverill snapped his fingers for
another drink, handed his glass to Dean without looking round, too busy he was
glowering at me. “You must have been keeping notes, though, something, you must
have
something
to tell us who? Or you told
young Sue, maybe, she’d know?”

“I don’t think so. If there are any notes, I haven’t found
them. And Suzie hasn’t said anything, except how secretive I was,” and still
was now, juggling too many secrets in my head and already finding it hard to
remember who knew what. If there were notes, I knew where they’d be; but I wasn’t
going to say in this company, any more than I was going to mention SUSI. Lots
more I wanted to find out first, before I’d even consider laying any cards on
the table. Many people I wanted to speak to; and among them Lindsey Nolan, only
that he was in a Spanish jail and likely to remain there a while longer.

Right now, I thought I’d better speak to someone else.

“Can I phone the flat? Just to let Suzie know where I am?”
And my mother
, but I wasn’t sure if they’d
clicked that she’d been the other passenger in the Mini, and if not I certainly
wasn’t going to tell them. I’d apparently told her to keep her head down; I’d
bloody sit on it if I had to, if there was no other way to be certain that she
would.

“Yes, of course.” Another click of the fingers, and Dean
appeared at my side with a cordless phone in his hand, the suspicion of a wink
trembling around his right eye.

“How did you find me this morning, anyway,” I asked
casually, “have you been watching the flat or what?”

Deverill laughed. “Not since last night. I called them off,
once you turned up. If you’d been doing a runner, you wouldn’t have come back,
would you? I was sending Dean to fetch you over tonight, no hurry; but we saw
your wife’s car in the street, and it seemed like a good time to get things
straight. Nothing but coincidence, that’s all.”

Which he’d acted on instantly: a warning there, I thought.

And then I gazed at the phone in my hand, and thought again;
and finally had to say, “Um, I’m sorry, but does anyone know my number?”

o0o

Suzie took some calming down, even after I told her who’d
been trailing us. She’d developed a major antipathy to the man already; she’d
been frightened on the road and bitterly resented that now; and though she
certainly wouldn’t admit it to me I thought she was uneasy in the flat today,
with those scratch-marks around the lock as reminders and only my mother for
company.

“Come home, Jonty.” Three or four times she said that, with
different emphasis in response to my different excuses. And at last, “If you’ve
done your business, come on
home
. What do
you want to eat with them for? Come and eat with us. You don’t even remember my
cooking.”

True, I didn’t; but, “Better not,” I said.

“God, you’re such a wimp! Just tell ’em: say, ‘Look, I don’t
like you. Maybe I work for you but that doesn’t mean I have to have lunch with
you, and my wife and my mother are waiting at home, so take me back, please.’
That’s all, it’s easy. Or call a cab, you’ve got the phone in your hand. Harry
Wong’ll come get you, I’ll give you his number. Can you remember it long enough
to dial?”