Risking It All (29 page)

I’d not had the slightest idea he’d followed me. I was surprised Hari had given him time off and wondered what excuse he’d given. There was nothing I could do about it now. I couldn’t march over there and demand to know just what on earth he thought he was playing at and did he mind not screwing up my nicely made arrangements. Sod’s law meant that Jerry Wilde would choose just that moment to appear. If he saw me with someone else, ten to one he’d turn round and go back down to the trains and home. So I turned my head, ignoring Ganesh. He was ignoring me too, but I knew he’d located me. I wondered how long he thought he could stand there studying the map before one of the undercover boys hanging around central London’s Tube stations decided he was a likely drugs pusher and nabbed him. You can spot the undercover boys with practice; they’re the scruffiest and least likely-looking ones. In addition, London Transport police had arrived in the shape of a couple of uniformed coppers, probably looking out for beggars. Jerry Wilde wouldn’t like the sight of them, either. To my relief, they moved off to check out elsewhere.

Not a moment too soon. So distracted had I been with all these possible spanners in the works materialising around me that I failed to see Jerry Wilde until he appeared in front of me.

‘Well?’ he said, by way of greeting. He loomed over me in a way that was meant to be and was intimidating. Though not a burly bloke, he was quite tall and appeared fit, the lean and muscular type. He probably played tennis or squash.

I pushed myself off the wall and tried not to look disconcerted. I couldn’t see Gan, who’d abandoned the wall map and was presumably lurking elsewhere in a manner meant to be inconspicuous.

‘I’ve got some news for you,’ I said to Wilde. ‘You won’t like it. The reason I’m telling you at all is because, despite what you think, I want to protect Nicola from learning the truth too.’

‘You are so sure you know what the truth is,’ he hissed at me.

One of the Transport coppers had returned. He was watching us suspiciously. He’d probably noticed me before, and now I’d been joined by this well-heeled gent was deciding I was on the game and this was my pitch. Damn it, we were going to have to move out of here.

‘We’ve got to go somewhere else,’ I said to Wilde.

‘You arranged here,’ he replied stubbornly. ‘I’m not changing the agreement.’

‘So tell our friend in blue over there about it.’

He glanced sideways and his thin features twitched. ‘All right. We’ll go and find a coffee shop. There must be one around.’

We set off up the litter-strewn stairs to street level. People poured past us coming down to the Tube from the pavements above. I guessed Ganesh was behind me somewhere, a little like the kid who’d followed the woman through the gates, though not quite so close. It’s a curious sensation when you know someone’s following you but you don’t know exactly where they are. The urge to check is instinctive. You have to concentrate on not turning round. I knew how Orpheus must have felt when Eurydice was following him out of Hades and quite understood how he hadn’t been able to resist looking back.

Luckily Wilde was too concerned with his own problems to worry about mine, and didn’t appear to notice my nerves. We struggled along wet Oxford Street pavements past the window displays, the roast chestnut braziers and
Big Issue
sellers, and finished up in the basement cafeteria at D.H. Evans with a couple of cups of coffee on the table between us. Two or three women shoppers sat a little further off, resting their feet, but there was no sign of Ganesh. I’d checked in every plate-glass window we’d passed, pretending an interest in everything from fashion to cookware, without spotting my very own knight in shining biker’s jacket. I didn’t think we’d lost him. He might have been there, close behind, but it was twilight now and the brightly lit windows didn’t reflect as they did in daytime. Whatever his shadowing skills, I hoped Ganesh had more sense than to come into this café. He’d look a bit obvious, all on his own, ears flapping in our direction.

‘So, what’s this news?’ Wilde was keeping to the lofty tone he’d adopted from the first.

‘Before I begin,’ I said, ‘let’s establish that you’re no longer pretending Nicola isn’t my sister.’

‘I shall never think of my daughter as your sister!’ he said angrily. ‘However, without admitting anything, I understand why, in her present circumstances, Eva is expressing interest in her. This is despite the fact that nearly thirteen years ago she abandoned any claims she may have thought she had. What I don’t admit is that she has any justification in pursuing that interest through you in the way she has. This is hounding me and my family. We have done nothing to deserve it.’

‘Will you come off that high horse?’ I’d had enough of this. ‘You’re in the wrong and you know it. Am I the one with something to hide? If you weren’t dead worried, you wouldn’t be here with me now. Like it or not, you and your wife and I are all in this together. I asked you to meet me today so I could warn you that the police have found out my mother had a baby. They know the baby was called Miranda and left the hospital with my mother, alive and well. They’re now curious to know what happened to her.’

That rocked him and knocked all the pomposity out of him. His face turned a ghastly greenish-grey. I thought he was going to throw up and got ready to dodge.

‘Police?’ he whispered.

I nodded. ‘But don’t worry. I haven’t grassed and I won’t. Nor will my mother tell them what she did if they get to ask her. She isn’t afraid of the police, not with things being the way they are for her. They might not get to question her at all if the hospice has anything to do with it.’

‘I don’t believe this!’ he burst out. ‘It’s some trick of yours to con money out of me.’

‘Please yourself,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want your money. It’d be like the thirty pieces of silver they paid Judas Iscariot, and that didn’t do him any good. I’m warning you for Nicola’s sake, that’s all.’

He licked his lips. ‘All this has happened because of you and your damn prying.’

‘No, this particular thing has happened because someone croaked Clarence Duke and brought the cops in on it.’

I waited for his reaction to that. I don’t know what I expected. That he’d start back with exaggerated gestures like an actor in a silent movie? Roll his eyes, look shifty and say he didn’t know what I meant? If so, I was disappointed. He was either a lot better actor than that, or he really didn’t know what I was talking about.

He looked puzzled, then faintly annoyed. ‘Who the devil is Clarence – what?’

‘Duke,’ I said. ‘He was a private detective. Now he’s a dead private detective. His death is what brought the police into this business. Not me. Not my mother.’

‘Private detective,’ he muttered. ‘Flora said you’d mentioned one to her. Said your mother had set one on to finding you, nothing about finding Nicola.’ He raised his head, eyes filled with suspicion.

‘He found me,’ I said. ‘Then someone found him.’

‘I don’t know.’ He was shaking his head. He looked confused and, for a moment, quite ill. ‘This is – is shattering. What am I going to tell my wife? She’s of a very nervous disposition. But look, even if the police know your mother had a child, they can’t track her down, not if your mother doesn’t tell them where to look – or you don’t.’

He didn’t, fortunately, know about Mrs Marks and her daughter Linda, and I wasn’t about to tell him. I didn’t need to.

I scotched his hopes for him with, ‘Don’t bet on it. The police are professionals when it comes to tracking people down. They’re quite capable of checking all the births in that hospital at the time. The inspector in charge, Janice Morgan, is really bright. Give her time and she’ll think of it.’

He passed a hand over his brow in a gesture which struck me as slightly theatrical, but perhaps that was just my prejudice.

‘I don’t know what to think . . .’ he mumbled.

‘All right, get your head round this. Far too many people know about my mother’s other daughter. It’s only a matter of time before they track her down. So what are you – are
we
– going to do about it?’

He stared down at his cooling cup of coffee for a moment, then appeared to make a decision and, in doing so to get back his nerve. He raised his head and the familiar self-righteous aggressiveness was back in his face.

‘We have kept scrupulously to any understanding with your mother. It is she who is breaking the terms of the agreement, not us. Perhaps we were wrong, as you put it, to reach any such understanding. Though I dispute your use of the word. It was only technically wrong. Morally, it was justified; more than that, it was right. Can you imagine how my wife and I felt when told our child had died? That Flora couldn’t have another? No, of course you can’t. Can you just try for a moment? We were devastated. Our world had fallen apart. Flora was almost out of her senses with grief. She couldn’t believe it had happened. She didn’t want to believe it. She talked of our baby as if she – as if she were still alive. At that point, our darkest hour, we walked into your mother. I believed then and still believe now it was meant. Whoever rules our lives, whether it’s God or Fate or whatever you believe it to be, that power put your mother in our path at that moment.

‘It was so – so simple. Your mother couldn’t keep Nicola. We could offer her a loving, secure and comfortable home. It would save my wife’s sanity as well. What’s wrong with any of that? It wasn’t done legally, by the letter of the law, I know. If we’d had time to think it over, had clearer heads at the time, we might have gone about it differently. But we didn’t. Once the dice have been rolled, you can’t change them. Life doesn’t give you a second throw. We took Nicola. We made her ours. She is ours.’

It was a pity, from his point of view, that he spoke the last words. He’d been doing well up to then, undermining my confidence. He’d about talked me round to his and Flora’s viewpoint on the whole business. What did I know of how a parent who has lost a child might feel? What did I understand of the emotions of a woman who longed for children but had been told she’d be forever childless? A woman who, before Nicola arrived in her life, had had to content herself with fussing over lonely little boys like Ben? What allowance had I made for the desperate state the distraught Wildes had been in at the time they’d made the pact with my mother? It was I, not Jerry, who had been adopting a tone of moral superiority.

Or that was how I’d begun to think until he’d spoken the word ‘ours’. Then I remembered that there was probably nothing, but nothing, he wouldn’t do to protect the child he saw as ‘his’. Something I suspected might even have already led him to murder.

Fired up, and as obstinate as he was, I retorted, ‘People don’t own other people, right? We don’t have slavery in this country. They banned it a couple of centuries ago. Parents don’t own their children. The only person to own Nicola’s life is Nicola herself. It’s up to her how she uses it. Perhaps she’ll make a career in music, as you seem to think she should. Perhaps she’ll chuck it all up and do something quite different. You know, be an air hostess or a nuclear physicist, or a singer in a sleazy bar in Soho.’

‘We wouldn’t stand in her way,’ he said stiffly, ‘unless, of course, she chose the last.’

‘I bet,’ I said sceptically. ‘But what are we going to do now? That’s the big question.’

An angry red suffused his face. He pushed away his untouched coffee. ‘Whatever I decide – my wife and I decide – it’s our business, ours alone. You are not required to do anything but stop hanging around my house. If anyone is going to lead the police to us, it’s going to be you, by your behaviour. How do I know they’re not watching you? How do I know we weren’t tailed here this afternoon?’

He gave a hunted look round the area but saw only the lady shoppers gathering up their packages in preparation to leave.

It was a bit late for him to think of that. But just as well he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He might have spotted Gan. Where was Gan?

‘All I want from you,’ Wilde was saying, ‘is your assurance that you’ll stay away from my house and my family.’

I had nothing further to gain from going back to his neck of the woods. ‘I’ll stay away,’ I promised.

Wilde got to his feet, towering over me again as I sat at the table. ‘I hope you remember that, Fran Varady. I really hope you remember.’ His voice was quiet but scared the living daylights out of me.

I watched him go with relief. My coffee was cold now and undrinkable, which was a pity. I fancied a cup. I gave Wilde time to get clear and then left the café. Ganesh was in the luggage department in the basement, reading all the price tags. A sales assistant was bearing down on him, the light of enthusiasm in his eye, determined to make an unexpected sale this late in the day. He’d be lucky.

I could’ve hailed Ganesh and rescued him but I was entitled to express my displeasure at his interference. I sailed past him and out of the shop. I only went as far as back to Oxford Circus, where I waited at the top of the steps down to the Tube, leaning on the balustrade.