Playing Grace (11 page)

‘I’m not explaining anything to anyone.’ Her mother’s voice was wearing its righteous indignation. ‘Your father is in the wrong. Sooooo in the wrong. The things he’s accused me of; the tone he’s used. He should be down on his knees begging me to forgive him. I’ve barely been able to get up off the sofa to ring you.’

As always, that tone of voice managed to reach down into Grace and pull up handfuls of irritation.

‘I’m sorry you’ve been laid low by this,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’d better go and find if there’s an all-night shaman
who can get your chakras realigned? Or massage your inner being?’

‘Don’t you take that snitty tone with me, Grace Surtees. And don’t you take his side.’

‘I’m not taking anyone’s side, except my own. Come on, Mum, you normally can’t wait to spill every single detail of your life.’

There was a pause and Grace imagined Felicity trying to think of a suitable come-back. On his chair, her father moved uneasily from one buttock to the other.

‘I am going to ignore that, Grace,’ her mother said finally. ‘I am going to ignore it because I know you can’t help being jealous of the way I’m in touch with my emotions. The way I feel deeply instead of hiding things away in boxes …’

‘Talking of boxes …’

There was a whump as her mother slammed the phone down.

‘What she say?’ her dad asked.

‘Nothing that made any sense. So no change there.’

Grace returned the phone to its base. She had intended to quiz her father some more, but it seemed as if he had become more round-shouldered since that phone call. She noticed how much his hair was thinning, the flecks of dandruff on his collar.

‘Dad, you look really tired. Come on.’ She picked up his toilet bag and handed it to him. ‘Go and find your pyjamas. Let’s get you to bed.’

‘I’ll just kip on the sofa.’

‘No, you won’t.’

After a tussle, he agreed that he would use her bed but there was no need to change the sheets. She wouldn’t hear of it and he gave in and retreated to the bathroom.

While he was in there, Grace stripped her bed and put on a fresh sheet, duvet cover and pillowcases. She dug out the spare single duvet from its plastic case in her store room and made herself a bed of sorts on the sofa.

From the bathroom came the noises of her father’s night-time routine – him flushing the loo, cleaning his teeth; silence while he wetted his comb and shook off the excess water before passing it through his hair; gargling. In a while he would use his inhaler and there would be a bout of coughing followed by nose-blowing.

She looked around her sitting room. Perhaps if she half closed her eyes it wouldn’t seem so much like a temporary housing shelter. There was no way she could stand this disruption for longer than one night, two at the most.

Back out in the hallway she waited for her father to finish rubbing his ointment into his heels and idly picked up some books from one of his boxes.
Unsolved Crimes of the 1960s, In Jack the Ripper’s Footsteps, City Fraud: The Big Players
. Returning them, she moved to a different box. Magazines this time, a sheaf of ones from the
In, Out and Undetected
series. A shuffle through them before unfurling one of the rolls of paper. It was a graph showing violent crime, borough by borough, from 2009 to 2012. Another roll showed a plan of the streets around a warehouse, bits of coloured paper indicating the position of cars.
The Haringey Heist
, her father’s jagged writing read along the top. Down the side there were various notes, including,
Warehouse manager? Address now? Any signs of a sudden rise in living standards/habits?

Her poor dad. He had wanted to join the police since he was a boy, but the height requirements at the time and his asthma had defeated him. ‘Short of height and short of breath’ the family mythology had it.

He’d made the best of it, getting into insurance and finally investigating claims, but it hadn’t fulfilled his need to be involved with the more hard-core kind of crime. Especially unsolved crime. Grace suspected that in his head he was a streetwise, slightly maverick detective high up in the Met, picking up on the leads that everyone else had missed. She put ‘The Haringey Heist’ back in its place.

Her family had always treated this hobby-cum-obsession with fond resignation – if the books and magazines, the charts and statistics helped him cope with that lifelong
disappointment of not being a policeman, that was OK. Sure, being dragged along to the site of famous robberies had got a bit boring when she was younger, but it didn’t compare to being one of those sad Neighbourhood Watch people ringing the police at every noise and pinning up
Do Not Breathe
notices on lampposts. And, as a hobby, it was less embarrassing than morris dancing.

Quite sweet really that he’d wanted to bring it all with him when he’d stormed out. It suggested he couldn’t bear to be parted from it. The words
however long he’s going to be here
slotted themselves on to the end of that sentence and she quickly called out, ‘Goodnight Dad, the bed’s made. Just let me know if you need anything else,’ before going into the sitting room.

As she got under the duvet, Grace remembered how she had lied about having a family crisis just to get out of going for a drink with Tate. And now here she was with a real family crisis. Her mother would say she’d tempted fate with that lie, and while she wasn’t buying into any of her mother’s pronouncements on how the universe was ordered, she couldn’t shake the idea that somehow the disruptive powers of Tate Jefferson had already begun to get to work.

CHAPTER
9

Alistair got off the train at Waterloo and tried to remember the last time he’d been up this early on a working day. Failing to manage that, he let himself be swept along by the other commuters as they surged up the platform, negotiated the ticket barriers and spewed out on to the concourse.

He imagined Emma still at home, probably only just getting into the shower. It had taken a lot of willpower to detach himself from her warm body in bed, but he needed that hour alone in the office to calm his thoughts before Grace arrived.

Over the weekend he’d decided that this thing with the other woman had to stop. He felt sick even thinking of losing her, but it was madness. A one-way ticket to … he stopped suddenly and got an elbow in his back and a snappy, ‘For God’s sake,’ from the guy behind him.

He wasn’t going to think about the destination of that one-way ticket. No need now anyway. He started walking
again. He had cast-iron willpower and he was going to end it today. Finito. No messing around with locked cabinets, locked anything. He was going to go in now and think it through calmly and then just get on with growing the business. Throw himself into that and into Emma. That was where the future lay. No good would come of going back to the old ways.

He repeated these mantras to himself as he caught the tube to Leicester Square and then made his way to the office. He felt resolute, chirpy even.

And then he realised that he wasn’t heading to the office, he was veering away from it. He stopped in front of a jewellery shop. Not yet open, its window had been cleared of the most expensive pieces, but a pair of earrings caught his eye, each a cascade of silver feathers. He imagined them in her ears and his resolve had gone, replaced by a juddering pulse. He put the palm of one hand on the glass as if he could push through and gather up the earrings, and when he moved his hand again, it left a damp mark on the window. He walked to the door of the shop and checked the opening times.

Moving away, he passed a shop selling shoes; the grille was down but he could see the straps and heels, the pointed toes.

He forced himself to start walking again. It was hopeless. He knew he’d be back later. Everything beautiful reminded him of her. Why had he thought he could break away?

He speeded up, desperate to get to the office and lock himself in before Bernice from downstairs arrived and spotted him. Good, she wasn’t in yet. He unlocked the main door, disarmed the burglar alarm and sprinted up to the first floor, feeling strung out with anxiety. But there was excitement there too … he was going to see her again. And he’d get those earrings for her. For next time.

He was in the wrong; he knew it. And he was only storing up trouble, but everyone had their drug of choice – alcohol, cocaine, premier league football. She was his.

CHAPTER
10

In Far & Away, Grace watched as Bernice laid the chintz material over her arm, between the wrist and the elbow, then the pink elephant cord higher up and the hard-wearing cotton with swirly red pattern over her shoulder.

‘For the sofa,’ Bernice reminded Grace, screwing up her eyes and giving the fabrics a quick once-over. Her free hand disappeared back into the drawer and a square of shagpile was brought out. Grace sensed Bernice’s hesitation about where to place the carpet, short of balancing it on her head, before she trapped it in the crook of her arm, between chintz and elephant cord.

‘That help?’ she asked.

Bernice’s renovation of her and Sol’s house in Finchley had progressed as far as the breakfast room, so to make a proper decision regarding the curtains, Grace not only had to factor in the shagpile but also the colour scheme in the kitchen and hallway.

It was the least she could do seeing as Bernice had
happily put up with her appearing just as she was unlocking the door and had listened as Grace explained about her father turning up in the middle of the night and not being able to get any sense out of either parent about what was going on. Bernice’s practical outlook on life made her the ideal person in whom to confide. She did not apportion blame; she was not interested in digging up motives or pawing over the possible emotions involved. Bernice simply helped you think of workable ways to deal with your current predicament so that you could return to where you had been. This often involved a level of honesty that wasn’t entirely welcome, and an absence of dithering and soul-searching that was.

Sitting here at this time of the morning, Grace was once again hopeful that things would get sorted out quickly. That hope had become tarnished over the weekend by her mother’s refusal to answer her phone and her father’s insistence that Grace was not to go and broker some kind of truce. Grace had ignored this and taken herself over to see her mother on Saturday, only to find she was not in. Having sat and waited for a couple of hours, she left her a note and came away. Grace had another go at tracking her down on the Sunday, spurred into action by the way her father’s possessions were stealthily migrating from the boxes and bags in the hallway and how Jack the Ripper
and his mates were now in piles all over her bedroom floor. There was still no Felicity at Newham, but the fact that the note Grace had left now had a
Not talking. Tell him to make his mouth work
scrawled across it showed she’d been there at some point. Grace had waited again but finally had to concede defeat and had returned to her flat to find her father’s books on one of the worktops in her kitchen. They had been arranged neatly, and in alphabetical order, but they were there nonetheless. Her father had been apologetic and given Grace an assurance that his charts and plans would not find their way on to her walls, but she knew the longer he stayed, the more the flat would look like a series of police incident rooms.

She glanced out through Far & Away’s large plate-glass window, past the sales notices where she could read, in reverse, just how cheap it was to fly to any of the Swiss ski resorts and hire your ski gear. The street was quiet: London, or at least this particular bit of it, was only just shaking itself to life and venturing out, and this morning that felt vaguely uplifting too, as if she had a head start on everyone. When she went upstairs in a minute and unlocked Picture London’s door, she knew that there at least it would be calm and ordered until the phones started to ring. If she was lucky, Alistair wouldn’t appear until mid-morning.

Or perhaps the resurgence of her optimism was just the result of being faced with racks of brochures showing a permanently sunny world. She studied the notices in the window again and the word ‘only’ kept catching her eye, reinforcing the sense that the entire world was within quick and easy reach; freedom just a matter of a few pounds.

In fact, the only grey cloud in this bright scene was standing just to the left of Grace’s chair: Esther, the other person who worked in the travel agency.

Esther was a bleached-out version of Bernice – light and lank-haired where Bernice was dark and glossy; pallid where Bernice was rosy-cheeked; concave where there were mounds and rolls and dimples. Probably in her mid-forties, Esther very rarely said anything and, as far as Grace could see, didn’t seem to do an awful lot either. What role she played in the company, or whether she was from Sol’s side of the family or Bernice’s, Grace had no idea. She had a languid air about her and leaned a lot – against desks, filing cabinets, anything really that was more stationary than she was. The only explanation Bernice had ever given for Esther’s pathological lack of vitality, lack of conversation, lack of anything that approached a personality, had been a mouthed ‘tube trouble’ and a hurried nod at an area below Esther’s waist.

Grace presumed this meant some kind of gynaecological problem and not that something unpleasant had happened to her on the Underground.

For someone who was largely silent, Esther had a way of involving herself in any conversation that bordered on the intrusive. Standing too close to you, she would, by tiny movements of her head and the way she worried at her bottom lip with her teeth or fingers, convey her reactions to what was being discussed. It was impossible to resist the urge to look and see which particular lip–head combo she’d employed as the result of something you’d just said.

It was obvious to Grace that Esther and Bernice did not like each other much, but that they followed the long-established British procedure of never actually bringing that dislike into the open. Only now and then did it seep out in a too icily polite request from Bernice and feigned deafness on Esther’s part – deafness to add to her bouts of playing dumb.