‘Right now. This minute. From here – you take it from here and you go to see her. Call first. But you go to see her.’
‘But it’s Sunday afternoon!’
‘So what?’
Zbigniew blew out his cheeks.
‘Right now,’ he said. That was Matya’s solution to his problem. She had not judged or criticised or second-guessed – which, he realised, was what he had both expected and feared. She wasn’t the type to say, take the money and run. And he was glad that she wasn’t like that. He was even gladder that she hadn’t done a Piotr and denounced him or told him off. But she had been clear and firm on what to do next, and it wasn’t what Zbigniew had expected to hear. He had been braced for more of the agonising that had been going on inside him. Instead, she simply told him to take the suitcase to Mrs Leatherby straight away: right now.
Moving slowly, as if daring Matya not to stop him, he fished his mobile, the Nokia N60 which had changed his life, out of his pocket. She watched. He found the number, held it up in front of Matya so she could see. Matya made no gesture. So Zbigniew pressed the dial button.
The phone rang six times. OK, she was out. Zbigniew moved to break the connection and then -
‘Hello?’
‘This is Zbigniew. The builder. I need to come and see you. Now, today.’
‘Oh! What’s wrong?’ said Mrs Leatherby.
‘Nothing but I need to come and see you. I can’t say over the mobile. You are at home?’ Of course she was, that was where he had called her. Sounding about as worried as a person could possibly be, Mary confirmed that she was at home. Zbigniew said he would be there in about an hour and a half, depending on the train times.
‘And now you have to come with me,’ he said to Matya. This was his revenge.
‘Why?’ Matya folded her arms.
‘I can’t go to this place I’ve never been before, and by the way I have no idea where exactly it is, carrying a suitcase with half a million pounds in cash, on my own.’
That was his excuse, anyway. She had grumbled a little, and pretended to prefer the idea of sitting alone in her flat, listening to the radio, before giving in. They had left the café and gone back to Pepys Road, Matya’s first time there since leaving the employ of the Younts. Zbigniew had taken her up to the room where he was sleeping – which stank of paint, something he always noticed when he came in from outside – and showed her the suitcase. Matya had looked at it, then looked at him, and said, a little sadly:
‘This is probably the only time in our lives we’ll ever see that amount of money in cash.’
And now Matya sat across from Zbigniew in the rattling carriage of the train to Chelmsford. The train kept seeming to have got out of London into the countryside, before being reswallowed by the suburbs. At one point there was a stretch of green fields, and Matya thought they’d got out of the city, but then there was a long sequence of tower blocks. Some sections of the journey were as beautiful as anything in Hungary, and some were as ugly as anything in Hungary.
The trip was supposed to take forty-five minutes, but at one point the train stopped in a field, without explanation, for a quarter of an hour, so now it was late. The compartment was full. Across from them sat a young man, wearing a baseball cap pulled down, staring straight in front of him while he listened to music over headphones and chewed gum. There was a can of lager on the table in front of him. Zbigniew had thought about putting the suitcase on the overhead luggage rack, but then found his head filled with pictures of the train braking or jolting and the suitcase being thrown down and bursting open and the air filling with ten-pound notes, the passengers gaping at him while he crawled around scrambling to pick up the cash… so no, not the overhead rack. Not the space for luggage at the end of the compartment. In the end he put it in front of his seat with his legs folded over it and every time Matya looked at him she had the impulse to laugh.
They pulled into Chelmsford station. Outside there was a car park and a café. A solitary taxi was waiting at the rank. The cab driver had his eyes closed with a newspaper folded over his stomach. Matya pointed at the café.
‘I’ll wait for you there. If it looks like you’re going to be more than an hour or so, call me,’ she said. Then she leaned over, kissed him, and set off across the car park.
The cab driver gave a jolt when Zbigniew opened the door, then shook himself awake. The trip to Mrs Howe’s house took ten minutes, past houses which to Zbigniew’s eyes all looked very similar, bungalows and near-bungalows. He had thought it would be more like a village but this was just a different sort of town. Zbigniew took the cabbie’s mobile number and paid him – five pounds, much cheaper than London. As he got out of the taxi he moved to shut the door, then realised, just as he was about to slam it closed, that he’d left the suitcase on the back seat. That would have been a very good way for the story to end.
99
Mary had been trying to keep herself busy since Zbigniew’s strange phone call. She was at the kitchen sink, washing up some pots which were in theory clean but which hadn’t been used for a bit, when she saw Zbigniew step out of the taxi and start walking up the drive.
Since her mother’s death, Mary had not been miserable all the time, but she had been flat. That was the word for it – flat. Of course she knew that what had happened was in one major way a relief: her mother had been set free of her suffering. Some people died lingeringly, horribly, for a period stretching into years. Petunia had suffered, and it had been too slow, but it wasn’t the worst of all deaths, and Mary was glad of that. And there was one kind of good news in her death – or what would have been good news if it could be considered in the abstract. The house had been valued at £1.5 million and the estate agent was bullish about the figure. Mary would never have to worry about money again. Indeed, if she didn’t want to, she’d never even have to think about it again. Alan’s garages did nicely and they were already well-off – exactly how well-off, she didn’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of question she liked to ask.
That was, for Mary, the trouble. The equation was too plain and too depressing. In the debit column, she had lost her mother; in the credit column, she now had a gigantic pile of cash. It felt as if her remaining parent had been taken away and in return she’d been given lots of money. Nothing else about her life had changed. Alan was still solid and dependable and, in his solid dependable way, a little distracted. Ben was still behind his wall of preoccupations, either in his bedroom doing God-only-knew-what on the internet or out doing God-only-knew-what with his friends; it wasn’t at all obvious to Mary which she liked less. The great positive addition to her life was her dog Rufus, a Yorkshire Terrier who was now three months old, and who was friendly, good-natured, not very bright, and the only living thing who seemed excited at the idea of being in Mary’s company. Now, as Zbigniew came up to the door, Rufus first ran to it, then back to Mary to check that she was aware of what was going on – come quick, developments! – and then back to the front door to yap at the prospective intruder. Keeping Rufus in position with her foot – which wasn’t hard, since the dog was mainly showing off his keenness – Mary opened the door.
The Polish builder was carrying a battered old brown suitcase. As he usually did, he shook Mary’s hand very formally. ‘I am grateful to you for agreeing to see me with so little warning,’ said Zbigniew.
‘Come in,’ said Mary. The roof has fallen in. One of my co-workers has been killed in an accident. I stayed the week at my girlfriend’s house and squatters have taken over your property. I have forged your signature on legal documents and 42 Pepys Road is now mine. The house has burned down in a fire and I wanted to tell you in person. Over the months working at your mother’s old house I have come to know you and love you as a person: please run away with me. But the builder’s manner did not correspond with any of those propositions. He looked preoccupied, but he did not look like the bearer of catastrophic news.