Dispossession (22 page)

“I expect I am,” I said. “I wasn’t at my best.”

“No. Any memory come back, then? Doctors told me it might.”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“Aye, well. It might yet; and you’ll let us know, yes? If it
does?”

“Yes, of course,” though I thought I was probably lying. I
no longer hoped to recover anything from those lost weeks; but if I did, I
thought, I’d want to keep it to myself awhile. At least until I had it sorted,
the old world and the new held in some kind of equilibrium in my head.

“Good lad. Now,” moving smartly on against my incipient
resentment,
don’t you patronise me
, “let’s
see if you can remember this, shall we? Are you by any chance any relation to
Mrs Elspeth Marks of Eskdale, Cumbria?”

The way he asked it, he already knew; but my heart was
sinking none the less.
Oh Ellie, God, what are you
up to now?
Most of my troubles, adolescent or adult, had started
something like this.

Still, I’d never denied it yet and wasn’t about to start.
“She’s my mother,” I said warily, wearily, whatever.

“She sure is,” Suzie put in from behind me, and how could
she be so cheerful about it? Naïvety, that was how, that was the only
explanation: sheer inexperience of her new role as daughter-in-law to the Lady
of the Lakes.

“Mmm,” he said. I noticed his little Klingon was in the
corner now, taking discreet notes. “It’s a pity you didn’t tell me that before,
don’t you think?”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because it would have answered one of my other questions,
wouldn’t it?”

He waited, I gave in. “Would it? Which one’s that, then?”

“What your connection was with Lindsey Nolan, of course.”

I tried, but I couldn’t find any “of course” there, any
connection at all. Two people, two different universes so far as I knew.

“Give up,” I said. “How do they fit together, my mum and
Deverill’s bent accountant?”

“How do any man and any woman fit together?” he snapped
back, and I thought he was just being a policeman, couldn’t walk a conversation
past an innuendo without picking it up and playing with it. I gave him nothing
for it, no smile nor grunt nor grimace; and after a moment I think he believed
me, or at least pretended to. “She’s one of his known acquaintances,” he said.

”‘Known acquaintances’? What does that mean?”

“In this context, it means she was his mistress. I’m sorry,”
as if that news had somehow power to hurt.

“Lover,” I said, automatically correcting. “Not mistress. My
mother was never anyone’s mistress,” though plenty of men’s lovers she had
been, and a different woman for each of them, to my judgemental eye.
“But—Christ, Lindsey
Nolan
...?”

“Uh-huh. Did you really not know?”

“I really didn’t know.” And was still trying to take it in,
to make it fit somewhere between what I knew of my mother and what I knew of
the runaway accountant, currently languishing in a Spanish jail.

Didn’t compute, really. Must be something I didn’t know, I
thought: about one or other of them at least, maybe about both.

But that was hardly news. My mother was all mystery to me,
always had been.

“Since when?” I asked. “And how long for?”

“Since the middle of last year, that we know of; and she
still would be, I suppose, if he hadn’t done a runner. She’d be visiting him in
Durham nick.”

“No.”

“No what?”

Actually the word had been out there in the big wide world,
making its own way before I’d thought to say it, let alone stop it. Still, too
late now, and I had this habit of honesty. “No, she’d have been long gone
before you picked him up. She’d have choked him off, petered him out, packed
her bags and left. My mother has an instinct, she can smell trouble coming and
she always,
always
gets out in time, before
the shit starts flying.” Always. That was an article of faith with me, and the
world would shake the day I was betrayed in this. Unless that was another
aspect of my new world, of course, that the old had shaken itself to pieces and
I’d been rebuilding in a universe where my mother didn’t have the nose for a
hard rain coming or the sense to seek shelter before it fell.

“Oh, yes? So why are we looking for her, then?”

“Because you’ve been misinformed. Obviously. Last year’s
lover, maybe, but she’ll know nothing to interest you, one sniff and she’s
gone...” Then it caught up with me, the full sense of what he’d said. I gazed
at him for confirmation, saw it in his tension; and, “You don’t know where she
is either, do you?”

“Either?” he repeated.

“I don’t have a clue,” I told him, to his transparent and
intense frustration. “She’s not at home, you’ll know that; and when she’s not
home, she moves around. Sometimes she gets in touch, usually not; only if she
wants me. And if she’s wanted me any time since January, I wouldn’t know. Would
I?”

“Doesn’t it worry you?” he challenged me. “That she’s
disappeared?”

“We’re not close,” I said levelly, and let him read what he
liked into that. My anxieties were my own affair, not for sharing.

“Mrs Marks?” He turned past me to Suzie, and I was suddenly
stricken with doubt, holding my breath to hear my mother betrayed. “Do you know
where your mother-in-law is just now?”

“Sorry,” she said, “haven’t a clue,” and her voice was all
Oriental inscrutability, and neither DCI Dale nor I had any notion if that were
true or not.

So it was back to me again, and, “Well, never mind. She’ll
turn up. Meanwhile, she’s definitely a connection; and you may not be close,
but you’d get involved, wouldn’t you? To protect your own mother?”

Yes, of course I would, but he wasn’t listening. “She won’t
be
involved,” I said, “she won’t need protecting.
Involvement doesn’t happen to my mother.”

“Unh.” Another grunt, and then, “So let’s see if we can work
out what your involvement is, eh? Why don’t you tell me everything you can,
about what Nolan was up to?”

“I only know what I read in the papers,” I protested.

“Wrong. You only think you know what you read in the papers.
Actually, you know a whole lot more than that. That’s what Vernon Deverill’s
employing you for, hadn’t you twigged that yet? You’re his secret weapon, to
get his money-man out of jail.”

Out of a jail in Madrid, and fat chance of that; what did I
know of Spanish law? Still, some things I couldn’t argue with, and this was
one: that Vernon Deverill had given me a lot of money—and
why so much?
was a question that still needed
answering, that this kind of mission didn’t resolve at all—and that it was
something to do with Nolan, which meant it had to be something to do with
getting him out of jail and off the hook.

“So come on,” DCI Dale said, “talk me through it. Lindsey
Nolan. Who is he, what’s he done, where is he now and what’s he waiting for?”

If he was a friend of my mother’s, then even this much was
treachery, or would be in another kind of family; but would she immolate
herself for me? Would she hell. I said, “He’s an accountant. Deverill’s
right-hand man, or used to be: Deverill made things happen, he brought the
money in, Nolan squirrelled it away. Half a dozen laundry schemes, tax
shelters,
very
smart investments that had
the SIB looking at them good and close for any sniff of insider trading, and
all they ever found was a massive stink and no evidence at all.

“He was bloody good at his job, and he should’ve stuck to
it. Deverill would’ve looked after him where he needed looking after, which was
anywhere in the big wide world outside his job. But Nolan got greedy, or
ambitious, or whatever. He wanted to be someone on his own account, maybe, not
living forever in our Vernon’s pocket. So he went a little bit freelance, didn’t
he, working evenings and weekends on his own account.

“He sat on the board of a big local charity, Deverill
encourages public virtue; and because of who he was, they made him treasurer.
And he played all his old games on this new money, and by the time anyone
noticed he had a neat little half-million or so sitting in his own bank and
earning interest when it should’ve been out there on the streets and doing
good.

“Someone tipped him off, that he was blown; so he jumped on
a plane to Spain before you lot could catch up with him. He got picked up over
there, though, and at the moment he’s sitting in a cell fighting extradition,
yes? He was, at any rate, the last I remember.”

“Still is,” Dale confirmed. “But that was very neat, son, a
nice little summary. You had that ready.”

And actually that was how it had felt in my mouth, in my
head: like a tidy package waiting to be accessed, and not for the first time.
Which made it the first access to any of my missing mind. Not the facts, I’d
had all those from before, I remembered reading them, hearing them, seeing them
on telly; but their collation into that handy couple of hundred words, I couldn’t
have done that without practice.

But there was nothing else I could call to mind, no further
facts, try as I might at Dale’s urging. And no, I was sure, my mother had never
mentioned Nolan to me. But then, had I spoken to my mother in the last six
months, nine months, year? That I wasn’t sure of, couldn’t swear to one way or
the other. Very Pinteresque, my mother and myself; many pregnant pauses. Long,
long
silences a speciality.

“All right,” he said at last, reluctantly and far too late.
“Let that go, for the moment. Whatever’s in your head, we can’t get at it. But
you must have files, yes? You’ve been working on this, working on something, at
least—”

“For Deverill,” I said, finishing his sentence. “You suppose
he’d let me put anything significant on paper? Be reasonable.”

“Well, you’re not one of his regulars, are you? You’re not practised
at his game. I thought maybe you’d do things your own way.”

It was a point I granted him, grudgingly. I said I’d look,
but I wasn’t hopeful. Actually what I wanted to look at was the computer; there
if anywhere, I thought. But I wasn’t going to plug that in and boot it up while
he was here. If I even admitted its existence, I thought he was in a mood to
take it away, and I wasn’t having that. He could take what I gave him, when I
chose to give it. Nothing more.

“So let’s look at what happened last night,” he said,
deprived of anything else to look at. “There’s the place you were thought to
be, the hotel; and there’s the place you actually were, which is here; and
burglars have had a crack at both. That’s not a coincidence, Jonty.”

“No,” I agreed.

“So what were they after?”

“Well, me, presumably.”

“What for?”

I didn’t know. He knew I didn’t know; this was getting us
nowhere, and Suzie’s mask was about ready to crack. I saw her rub a finger
across her lips, the most nerves she’d shown so far in public.

“Put it this way,” I said. “We’re assuming that for some
unknown reason, Vernon Deverill has hired me to help get Nolan out of prison,
yes?”

“Aye.”

“So who’d be most keen to frustrate that?”

“You tell me,” he said; so I did.

“You would. You lot. You’ve had him arrested and banged up,
presumably you want him to stay that way. If I was you, Detective Chief
Inspector Dale, I’d be asking questions around your own team. Okay?”

o0o

Clearly not okay, not by a long chalk, though Suzie was
practically cheering. A point for us, and it was nice to be unequivocally on
the same side for once.

He tried to wring some other suggestion from me and failed
utterly, for the very good reason that I had no other suggestion to make. The
unknown me might have been able to help him further, but not I. I think, no, I’m
sure that he thought I was stalling or stonewalling, being stroppy and
uncooperative. In the end, though, he gave in with a shoddy grace. He tried me
with the man dead in the van, but I couldn’t help him there either, I’d never
heard the name. At last he left, promising to return. “And you keep in touch,
Jonty,” he said. “Anything happens, anything occurs to you, your memory comes
back, anything, you let me know. Understood?”

Oh, yes. Well understood, officer; and thanks for calling
round; and farewell.

And with the door closed against his returning, Suzie and I
stood looking at each other, waiting perhaps for a bright or brilliant move, a
suggestion, a solution; and the phone saved us from our own failures and each
other’s. We both moved for it, but I was closer. I almost had my hand on it
before I checked,
her flat, her phone
, and
glanced at her for permission.

And got it with an irritable wave of the hand,
it’s your flat too, how often do I need to tell you?

And picked the phone up, heavy in my hand, and felt no
presentiment at all; and said, “Hullo?” expecting only to hear the voice of a
stranger asking for Suzie; and heard instead the voice of my mother running
like silver, creaking like wood in the wind and coming with such delicious
timing that surely I should have known, it could have been no one else. DCI
Dale wouldn’t be down to street-level yet, and here was his most-wanted mother
coming through to her son beautifully behind his back.

“Darling,” she said. “Is it safe, can I come out yet, can I
go home? I’m bored with all this hiding.”

“God almighty, Ellie...” I needed a sofa, right there and
ready to drop into; and there wasn’t one, and I wasn’t up to the walk across
the room. Not when there was wall at my back strong enough to slide down, floor
beneath me strong enough to hold me once I’d slid.

“Oh, is that
her
? I don’t
believe it,” from Suzie, “is she all right, where is she?”

And from my mother into the other ear, “That sweet wife of
yours hasn’t improved your language any, swearing at your mother,” which was
deeply rich coming from her. And also suggested some sort of collusion, some
idea of common cause between her and Suzie, which I didn’t much like. An
uncomfortable pairing that would be, even outside of crisis.