Killer Instinct (16 page)

“Maybe I'm just used to men seeing me more as a potential sparring partner,” I hedged. Or as a target.

The chef reappeared at that moment with two succulent Spanish omelettes that melted on your tongue. We both dived in like we were starving. There was a long pause before Marc took up the thread of the conversation again.

“I think it's only fair to tell you that a sparring partner is not how I think of you at all,” he murmured. His voice was rich with hidden meanings, most of which I didn't want to think about right now.

“Yeah, right,” I said, trying not to squirm.

“So cynical for one so young.”

I regarded him straight-faced. “I'm forty-five really, but I've got this painting in the attic,” I said.

To my surprise, he frowned, shaking his head. “I don't get you.”

“Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
,” I explained and dredged the abridged story line from a long-forgotten pigeonhole in my memory. “He was an exceptionally beautiful young man who lived a life of total depravity, but he had a portrait of himself which he kept hidden away, and while he utterly escaped the ravages of time and the effects of his own immorality, his likeness in the picture grew more hideous and more ugly.” I shrugged diffidently. “We studied him at school.”

Marc raised an eyebrow, and took another sip of his wine. “They didn't go a bundle on Oscar Wilde where I went to school,” he said wryly. “Didn't go much on education either, for that matter.”

“It doesn't seem to have done you much harm,” I commented.

He inclined his head slightly with a modest smile. I must remember that method of accepting praise. It was gracious without being smug.

“Ambition can overcome plenty of obstacles if you're determined enough,” he said quietly. He pulled out a packet of cigars and lit one, dunking the end directly into the flame until it caught. “I grew up with plenty of ambition and not much else.”

He pushed his empty plate to one side and twirled the stem of his glass between his forefinger and thumb. He watched the pale golden liquid shimmer in the bowl for a few moments, lost in his thoughts. That single diamond on his little finger dazzled as it caught the light.

Finally he looked up, and met my eyes levelly. “I was born in one of the grimmest tower blocks in the roughest areas of Manchester,” he said. “My mother overdosed when I was seven.”

The bald statement hung in the air between us like it had suddenly grown a body. Stricken, I searched for the right thing to say, but had to admit defeat. There wasn't any right thing.

Marc suddenly seemed to realise what he'd said. He waved an elegant hand mockingly towards his expensive attire, as if only too aware of the contrast with his present-day situation. “If you saw anybody round my old haunts wearing a suit it was usually because some time that day a judge was going to be referring to them as ‘the accused’.”

I felt my shoulders relax a fraction. “Sounds like one of those places where the ambulance crews have to go in wearing flak jackets.”

Marc half-smiled, little more than a derisive twist of his lips. “Oh no,” he said, “they never bothered sending ambulances.”

***

When I finally left the New Adelphi Club it was almost three-thirty. There are not normally two three o'clocks in my day and I was shattered. My eyes felt as though someone had emptied the contents of a seaside sandal into them. My hair and even my fingernails stank of cigarettes.

There was almost no traffic on the ride home, and I was able to give part of my brain over to thinking about the snippets of his past that Marc had handed to me during supper.

The contrast with my own upbringing was stark. While he'd been avoiding rats in pissy stairwells, and dodging the drunken fists of yet another temporary uncle, I'd been taking ballet classes and going to the Pony Club. There'd been a lot of distance travelled between then and now. For both of us.

The rain hadn't eased off on the way back to Lancaster, so I wasn't surprised when I hit the light switch at the bottom of the main staircase in the hallway below my flat and nothing happened.

I think the wiring in the whole of the building was rejected by Noah for the ark because it was past its best even then. Every time there's heavy rain with the wind in the north-east the water seeps in somewhere like a thief and the circuit breakers in the basement click out.

It took me ten minutes or so, swearing, to stumble down there with a torch and flip them back in line. I tripped over a pile of junk on the way and I just knew I was going to have a bruise on my shin the size of a beer mat.

Great! Still, the way things had gone at the club, it was probably the perfect end to a pretty shitty sort of a day.

I fell into bed and into sleep almost simultaneously, but it wasn't untroubled slumber. I woke abruptly in the early hours, before it was light, from a jumbled dream where my father was trying to inject my mother with rat poison through a huge syringe.

She kept screaming and struggling and my father was ordering me to hold her down. I tried to do as I was told, crying because I knew it was wrong. When I looked up at him and he'd changed into a giant rat with yellow eyes.

I looked back down at my mother, but she'd changed, too. It was Susie Hollins I was holding now, on the dance floor at the New Adelphi, while a shadowy madman with a razor-sharp knife reared over us both. He laughed as the blade came slashing down to cut her throat.

After the rain, Sunday morning showed up dry, lit by pale watery sunshine. The sort of crisp weather, close to warmth, that fools spring plants into making an early break for the surface, only to be decapitated by the next frost.

Not that I saw much of the morning. By the time I'd dragged myself out of bed it was past ten o'clock. I worked out to try and lift my energy reserves up from semi-dormant, but I'm not sure I managed to hoist them much over hibernating tortoise level.

I showered straight after, glad to finally wash the last of the smoky smell out of my hair. I dumped all the clothes I'd been wearing into the washing basket, wrinkling my nose.

I had grapefruit juice for breakfast, drinking a glassful with the shutters open, looking out across the Lune. The water level was high that morning. Sometimes the river seems no more than a stream, sandwiched between two rock-strewn, greyish mud banks. But during high springs, with an onshore wind giving it a step up, it can completely flood the stone quay.

At times like those the residents try, Canute-like to fend the water away from their front doors and cellar windows with sandbags. The unlucky ones discover just how good the anti-corrosion warranty is on their cars, parked outside.

I took the precaution of buying a set of tide tables just after I moved in. If the weather looks bad I shift the bike up the ramp they used to use for loading trucks at the back of the building. It leads to a solid brick platform, about four feet above pavement level, just outside the old boarded-up rear doorway. Then I watch the mopping up exercise from the safety of my first floor balcony.

OK, so maybe balcony makes it sound grander than it really is. In reality all I have is an old iron railing about three feet off the floor, embedded in the sandstone and misshapen with rust. I usually treat its protective qualities with caution. I've no desire to find out the hard way that the railing is only held in by the skin of its teeth and a bit of flaky mortar. There's a good twenty-foot drop to the flagged pavement below.

Now I stood leaning on the stonework enjoying the view. I checked my watch, looking forward to nothing more strenuous than a ride out to Jacob and Clare's for lunch.

Afterwards, I looked on the half an hour or so I spent then as a little oasis of calm before I was hit by a full-blown hurricane. Complete with monstrous winds and tidal waves.

Traffic on the other side of the river heading into Morecambe was reasonably light. There was just the soothing rumble of a train crossing the Carlisle Bridge to the west of me. The odd car moving past on the quay below.

Then the phone started ringing.

Reluctant to spoil the mood, I turned away from the window and went to answer it. I had no premonitions as to who was calling me, just a mild curiosity. My pupils tended to respect my weekends, and I'd never built up the kind of friendships with people who loved to chat from a distance.

“Hello?”

“Hello Charlotte.” A man's voice, authoritative, but quiet and self-contained. The sort of voice you could imagine imparting the news of terminal cancer with cool detachment. He had probably done so on more than one occasion.

My father.

I was momentarily stunned. In all the time since the rift between my family and I had first opened up, through all the attempts by my mother to heal the breach, he had never contacted me. Not once.

The last time I'd seen him was just before the court martial. He hadn't bothered to embroil himself in the civil action I'd then impulsively brought against my exonerated attackers. Not after I'd turned down the exclusive legal services of one of his golf club cronies. The guy was a full-blown silk and I couldn't afford those sort of rates. Not when, if I'm honest, the realistic chances of winning looked so slim.

My father had offered to pay, of course, but by then relations had deteriorated enough for me to haughtily refuse my parents' charity. Perhaps, if I hadn't been so proud, the outcome might have been very different.

“What do you want?” I demanded roughly now, shock making me ungracious, and resentful that he was the cause.

I could just picture him, sitting in his study at home, with his back to the high sash window. His rosewood desk would be in front of him, with the leather-cornered blotter sitting exactly centred. Besides the telephone, there would be nothing else on the desktop. Paperwork was ruthlessly dealt with the moment it arrived.

“Your mother is very upset,” he said, his tone eminently moderate.

“That makes two of us, then,” I shot back.

He sighed. “At risk of stooping to cliché, two wrongs do not make a right, Charlotte,” he said.

“Is that so? Perhaps she should have thought of that before she betrayed me.”

“Don't be so emotive,” my father rapped, more like his old self. It made what he said next so much greater a surprise. “Can't you simply accept that she made a mistake? An aberration in a weak moment. It's something that she bitterly regrets, and it's causing her untold grief that you can't find it in you to forgive her.”

Typical of my father, that. Giving with one hand and taking back with the other. An admission of guilt coupled with a pointed reminder of my own failings. He made my reaction sound like a character defect. Hardly surprising, when I thought about it.

“An aberration?” I snapped, unable to prevent my voice rising like a police siren. “She refused to stand up and support me when I was on trial, and you call it an
aberration
?”

“The evidence against you was substantial, Charlotte. On principle, she had to believe that the judicial system came to the correct conclusion. You must understand that,” he said, more gently. “She is a Justice of the Peace, after all. What else could she do?”

“What about me?” I cried, feeling like a child. “What about her daughter? Surely that takes precedence over the damned system? Where were her principles then?”

“She is sorry, you know. She may not be able to admit it outright, but she is, all the same,” he went on, as though I hadn't spoken. “For the damage she's done.”

I tried that out for size on the twisted corner of my psyche that had been feeding on my bitterness and hostility towards them for the last couple of years. It had been leaching acid into my mind like a perforated ulcer. His words should have acted like a balm, but all they did was make it burn more savagely. So she was sorry, was she? For the result, not for the cause.

It was much too little, and way too late.

“And what about you?” I demanded.

His pause, a fraction too long, spoke volumes. “That's not the issue, here, Charlotte,” he said evasively. “This was never about you and me.”

“No, it never was, was it?” I said woodenly. “I don't think I've anything more to say to you.” And I'm not ready to forgive either of you, I added silently.

“In that case, I'm sorry to have disturbed your Sunday morning,” he said without inflection. “Goodbye Charlotte.”

The phone clicked and went dead in my hand. I put it down like it weighed heavy, and moved slowly back to the open balcony, but where before the hum of cars across the river had been hypnotic and anodyne, now it grated.

I finished off the last tepid dregs of my coffee and was about to turn away from the view when I idly noticed the Vauxhall police car approaching along the quay. I felt the first stirrings of apprehension as it moved slowly into view, the occupants glancing up at the houses, obviously looking for an address. They stopped outside mine.

Two uniforms climbed out, adjusting their caps. It looked like the same pair who'd come looking for me the week before at Shelseley. I sighed, and went to spoon instant coffee into a couple of mugs. If being paid a visit by the local law was going to become a regular occurrence, I suppose I'd better at least be sociable.