Dispossession (25 page)

And she shrugged,
can you
believe that?
, at the ignorance of these people; and I almost smiled at
the gesture, so very much my mother. Of course she wasn’t mixed up in someone
else’s twisted manipulations, she had far too good a sense of
self-preservation. Besides, she’d doubtless have been too deeply tangled in her
own, much too busy to bother.

Suzie was nodding, following the logic, not knowing my
mother well enough to see that there was no logic there. I thought probably her
next question would be tangential,
so why were you
hanging out with that man?
or something like it. So I interrupted in the
moment of her silence, earning myself a glare that I could feel, although I
wasn’t even looking in her direction.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “that makes no sense at all.”

Only to us
, my mother’s
smug smile said; and again Suzie drew breath to speak, probably to disagree
with me; and again I snatched the moment for myself, before their
misunderstandings dragged us away from what I wanted to say, from what seemed
to me imperative and urgent.

“Lindsey Nolan was defrauding a charity,” I said, “to coin
himself a bit of petty cash. What’s a security firm’s interest in that? I doubt
they were making donations, and they certainly wouldn’t be employed to protect
the charity’s funds. Why would they be the least bit concerned? Let alone
threatening to murder his girlfriend, after he’d skipped the country?”

Suzie grunted, seemed reluctantly to concede that as a fair
point, and glanced at my mother for an explanation.

And got another of those patented shrugs, and “How should I
know?” said my elegant, eloquent parent.

“Didn’t you
ask
?”
demanded my wife, disbelieving. “I mean, Jonty must have known something, or he
wouldn’t have known to warn you...”

“Of course I asked. But does he trust his mother, with
information vital to her health and wellbeing? He does not.”

o0o

Meeting a brick wall there, Suzie tried the other tack, the
what-were-you-doing-hanging-out-with-Nolan-anyway line of enquiry; and this
time, as I could have forewarned her, the wall wasn’t brick but breezeblock.
This time it wasn’t that my mother didn’t know the answers, only that she was
under no circumstances going to divulge them. Suzie battered, she had
persistence on her side if nothing else; but my mother had a long life’s-worth
of acquired skill in guile and evasion, and no slip of a girl was going to
break that down.

At last Suzie seemed not to accept defeat, not that, but
simply to recognise that if she was going to carry on banging her irresistible
head against my mother’s liquid, changeable immovability—which certainly she
was—then there must be more comfortable places and ways to do it than twisted
around in a Mini. So she turned to face forward, with a cold glower at me
en passant
, set the car in motion and took us
slowly back towards the flat.

I don’t know if she was looking in her mirror more often
than usual, perhaps to watch her brother’s dream or else this first faint hint
of his enemy retreating and retreating at our rear; but after a couple of
minutes she was surely looking in her mirror more often than even a paranoid
learner would, and then she started taking wrong turnings, taking us away from
the flat and towards nowhere in particular, so far as I could tell.

Easy enough to guess what was happening, but I asked anyway.

“What’s up, Suzie?”

“We’re being followed. Big black limo, see it? Couple back?”

My turn to twist in my seat; and yes, I saw it. Classic
baddie transport, blacked-out windows and all.

But then, our windows were blacked out also;
let’s not jump to conclusions, folks. Family.

I said that, or some part of it. Took it on faith that she
was right, that they were following; but, “Let’s not jump to conclusions, they
may not be malign.”

“Oh, what? Do me a favour! My brother’s dead, your mum’s
been living in hiding, someone tried to explode you with a burning truck; and
now someone’s trailing us and giving off very bad vibes indeed, and you want to
give them the benefit of the doubt, do you, Jonty?”

Actually, right then I wanted to hug her: just one of those
impulses you get sometimes. But she was driving fast round some tight corners
in traffic, and it didn’t seem the moment. Besides, she was right. Jumping to a
conclusion here was the only safe, the only sensible thing to do.

And that only the first jump in what could prove to be a
triple or a whole series. The next, I thought, was obvious; time to leap
without looking. “I’ll jump out,” I said. “At the lights,” added quickly, not
to let them think I thought myself a hero, to fall and roll in the road at
speed.

“The fuck you will,” Suzie snarled. “Fucking hero,” and all
my good work gone to waste. “Who says they’re after you, anyway?”

“Only one way to find out. And I’m not being a hero. Forget
the movies; anyone on foot in a city can get away from a car. It’s easy.”

“Suppose they get out of the car?”

“Then I’ll grab hold of the nearest policeman and cry
sanctuary. That’s what you do, too; if they keep coming after you, just drive
to the police station. Promise?”

“Why don’t we all drive there, right now?”

“Because we’re too much in the dark here,” though I was
improvising this, I hadn’t thought it out in the slightest. Maybe I did have a
touch of the hero in me after all; unless it was only adrenalin pumping through
my system,
fight or flee
and going tamely
to the police not on the list there, not a biological option. Or else it was
the biological male in me, wanting to protect my womenfolk. All sorts of
reasons there seemed to be, if not the one I told her. “If we split up, they
have to do one thing or the other, come after you or come after me; and at
least that tells us something.”

She didn’t look convinced, but I wasn’t offering her a veto
on this one and the gods were against her anyway, there were traffic lights
just ahead turning red with a lovely sense of timing.

“See you back at the flat, okay? And if it’s you they want,
don’t be stupid, right?”

“Tell it to yourself,” she muttered, “don’t tell it to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. See you. ’Bye, Mum...” And altogether
heroically I stepped out into the road as soon as Suzie had nosed reluctantly
to a stop, slammed the door behind me and was off, picking a way through the
traffic and then sprinting across a car park, my mind already plotting a route
that was all footpaths and alleys, no chance for a car to track me.

Far end of the car park and halfway up a grassy bank, I
looked behind, quick as a flick; and yes, there was someone coming after. Had
the car stopped or gone on, had they divided as we had divided, were there
enough of them to do that, had I gained no advantage at all for myself or my
family?

Couldn’t tell, couldn’t see, didn’t have time. Whoever was
chasing me was coming fast. Fit and hard he looked, what brief time I had him
in my eyeline. So I jerked my head to the front again, and ran.

Up and down the grassy slopes, in and out the alleys: I ran
and he followed, and at last, unintentionally, here we were in Chinatown, or
lurking just behind it. Slippery cobbles and the smell of rotting cabbage, no
sunlight; the old city wall on the one side and the backs of restaurants on the
other, above them the backs of clubs and other businesses; and above one of
them was the flat. I was more or less leading him straight to my mother,
straight to Suzie, handing over hostages with a fixed and stupid smile.

Perhaps I’d have stopped then, regardless; perhaps I’d have
gone with him to any fate he chose, only to keep them safe. I didn’t need to
choose, though, because it was him who stopped, just long enough to bellow at
me.

“Jonty! For Christ’s sake, mate...”

At that—and with the comfort of distance, I was still
keeping thirty or forty metres ahead—I looked back, saw him not running and let
myself not run any longer. Stood gasping, shaking, hugely overdrawn on oxygen;
and now that I was looking, not seeing only an enemy chasing, I could see who
that enemy was.

Hard to think of him as an enemy, when I’d only met him the
once and that time he’d saved my life.

So I stood still, not going even halfway to meet him as he
came but not running now. How possibly, how the hell could I run?

Besides, fit and hard he undoubtedly was, and I wasn’t. He’d
have caught me, soon or sooner. Better to give myself over now, try not to make
it look too much like defeat or surrender.

“Dean. Hi...”

“What the fuck are you running for?” Bastard wasn’t even
breathing hard. “What’ve you done? Apart from pissing Vernon off?”

I shook my head. “Nothing, as far as I know,” though that of
course was not far, not far at all. I could have done murder and not known it.
“Only someone’s after us, and...” And running away had seemed like a pretty
good idea, at the time. Now, of course, I felt nothing but stupid, cowardly,
ridiculous.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Vernon’s after you.”

I shook my head. “Someone else.”
Someone worse.
“Whoever sent that truck through
the hospital wall, most likely. Unless it was you broke into my hotel room last
night, and then came round the flat and tried there?”

“Not me. No one else of Vernon’s, either. I’d know. Do you
want protection?”

Yes, I did want protection; but not, I thought, from Vernon.
Last time, it had come in a uniform with
Scimitar
on the shoulder-flashes. In retrospect, that didn’t make me feel any too
protected.

So a quick change of subject, nice and clear: “How are your
arms?” I asked, remembering that he’d been burned badly enough to be kept in
hospital overnight.

“My arms are fine,” he said, “all new and shiny, pink as a
baby’s arse. Do you want protection?”

Bastard. No, I said, thanks very much all the same; and he
said, “Well, see what Vernon thinks.”

“
No
, Dean. It’s my
choice, not his.” My life, and I was only just starting to get a grip, and that
only on a couple of corners. I wouldn’t willingly cede any fraction of that
little control to someone else.

“Maybe. Okay,” lifting his hands in mock surrender as I
glared at him, “I won’t ask him. I swear. But if you change your mind, just
say. We can fix you up. Not a problem.”

And then one of those strong hands—and yes, there was new
smooth pink skin across his knuckles, clearly to be seen now that I was
looking—reached out to grip my elbow, light and easy as a loose noose, and he
said, “Come on, then, Jonty. You’re invited for lunch. We’ll have to run for
the bus now, you’ve lost us a lift and believe me, you don’t want us to be
late.”

o0o

And I went, of course, how not? Still painfully aware how
close we were to Suzie and my mother, I’d have gone anywhere, I think, with
anyone. Going off for lunch with Dean seemed like a pretty good option, in the
circumstances. Even with Vernon Deverill for host.

Dean had been joking, it seemed, about running for the bus.
No trouble for him, but now that I’d stopped I couldn’t have run anywhere to
save my life or my mother’s. Or my wife’s, come to that.

He’d been joking altogether about the bus, as it turned out.
We walked slow and steady to the wall’s end, and if he kept his hand under my
elbow all the way no doubt it was only there as a support, he’d seen how blown
I was; and there was the bus station, right enough, but there was a taxi-rank
also and we took a cab.

o0o

Deverill lived out of town, and no surprise there, I’d
expected nothing else. A drive of four or five miles brought us to a pair of
wrought-iron gates, watched over by a closed-circuit camera on a vandalproof
pylon. Contrary to orthodoxy, form doesn’t have to follow function; the gates
at least were beautiful.

Clever, too. At a word from Dean the taxi-driver just drove
straight at them, and they swung silently open for us, while the camera turned
its head to watch.

Deverill’s driveway added maybe another mile to the journey,
winding narrowly through mature woods and then running straight across
sheep-pastures—lush and level as a lawn, these, so different from the
sheep-scattered hills of yesterday, not Luke country at all—and a mediaeval
bridge so narrow that pedestrians had needed passing-places even when they
built it, little niches of shelter in the stone.

And then, at last, there was the house.

A big square Georgian statement,
we’ve got money
, a couple of centuries later it
should have been National Trust, it had that look about it. That it wasn’t,
that it was still a private house in the ’90s only renewed and underscored that
original statement.
Some of us have still got
money, and we’re quite willing to flaunt it
, that house said to me
today.

Just a couple of cars parked in the forecourt, one the same
darkened limo that had trailed us through town, the other a Jag in vibrant red.
Some other guest for lunch, perhaps? Or Vernon’s private car, for when he didn’t
want to travel in chauffeured splendour?

Whichever, it didn’t matter. If another guest, then our
difference in status became all too apparent, all too quickly. Dean directed
the taxi around to the back of the house, through a stone arch into what must
have been the stable yard, what was now clearly parking for staff. A dozen cars
here, none of them quite new and none of them at all grand; and once he’d paid
off the taxi, even Dean had to sound a buzzer to get us in through the
reinforced door, for all that the cameras had watched our arrival and knew exactly
who we were.

This part of the house had been altered past any
recognition, almost past bearing. Narrow corridors and small offices, computers
everywhere, strip lighting and fire doors and not a glimpse, not the least
ghost of how it used to be. Cruelty to eloquent buildings, this was. Deverill
clearly believed in bringing his work home with him. But Dean hustled me along
with no more than a nod to any of the people we passed, and he took me through
one last heavy door and into an utterly different world.