‘You stupid little bitch! Which part of never call me again did you not understand?’
‘I’m not calling you, I’m calling on you. And don’t you call me a fucking bitch!’ Which took the wind out of his sails, at least for a moment. Karen used that moment to her advantage. ‘My father’s still alive, isn’t he? And you know where he is.’
He regained his composure, and his anger, and took two steps towards her, grabbing her arm and pushing his face into hers. ‘You fool! You’re risking everything. Were you followed here?’
Karen was startled. ‘Followed? Who by? Who would want to follow me?’
He breathed his anger and frustration in her face. ‘You have no idea, do you? What even gives you the notion that your father’s not dead?’
‘He left a letter for me with my godfather. I wasn’t supposed to get it for another year, but he gave it to me yesterday.’
Deloit tipped his head back, eyes directed to the ceiling. ‘Goddamned stupid fucking idiot!’ Then he seemed to collect himself and directed his ire back at Karen. She felt his fingers tightening around her upper arm, bruising her, she was sure. ‘You have to leave. You have to leave now! And you have to forget that any of this ever happened.’
‘Why?’ Karen very nearly shouted in his face.
But he shook his head. ‘What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But what you do need to know is that your father gave up everything for you. Everything! And if you go on like this, you’re going to fuck it all up.’ He pulled her across to the window and peered through the dirt, down into the lane. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here. But not the front way. Come with me.’ And he dragged her towards the door. As he opened it, she pulled her arm free.
‘I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what’s going on.’
His eyes were wide and wild, tiny drops of spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth. ‘If you care remotely about your dad, if you value his life, and his work, then you’ll go, Karen. Just go. And take my word for it. You are putting his life in danger.’
His words struck her like blows from a fist. Each and every one of them. You are putting his life in danger.
He took her arm again and hurried her downstairs. But instead of opening the front door, he led her back along the hall and into a small kitchen where she smelled stewed coffee and stale food from empty carry-out containers on the worktop. He unlocked a reinforced metal door and pulled it open. Outside was the narrowest of lanes lined with bins that overflowed on to the cobbles. She caught the movement of some creature scuttling off into the late afternoon gloom.
He glanced either way along the lane then propelled her out into it. ‘Go home. And if you care at all about your dad you’ll not breathe a word of this to anyone. Do you understand?’
Karen nodded, and stood mute and bereft in the shadow of the brick facades that towered above her, the tiniest sliver of sky dividing them a long way overhead. The slamming of the door echoed in the silence, and she heard him locking it again. Somewhere distantly she became aware of the rumble of traffic, and she rubbed her arm ruefully where fingers of steel had gripped them. She wanted to cry. And perhaps just twenty-four hours ago tears would have been spilled. But however aggressively Richard Deloit might have screamed in her face, ejecting her from the back door of OneWorld and telling her to go home and forget everything, she knew with certainty now that her dad was still alive. Which made her even more determined than ever to find him.
Karen sat in a tiny Starbucks in the Trocadero, just off Leicester Square, nursing a grande caramel macchiato. On one side stood a bureau de change, on the other, a homeless man wearing a baseball cap and wrapped in a torn and dirty coat squatted on the pavement, leaning back against the pillars. The two extremes of modern Britain sandwiching an American coffee shop. Her anger, by now, had been given time to ferment and was fizzing inside her. Why had she let Deloit treat her like that? Why had she not stood her ground and demanded the truth? How pathetic was she that she had allowed him simply to push her out of the back door and leave her standing like an idiot in that back alley?
Such was the level of her indignation that she was tempted to go back and hammer on his door, screaming for answers until she got them. But the one thing that stopped her was the recollection of the words he had almost spat in her face. You are putting his life in danger.
She had no idea how that was possible, or why. But it scared her. He had faked his own suicide. And you didn’t do something like that without a pretty damn good reason. Were you followed here? Deloit had demanded of her. Who would have followed her, and how would she have known if someone had? She glanced around all the faces in the coffee shop. They were young people, mostly, heads buried in phones or tablets or laptops, as oblivious as people in the Underground of everyone else around them. No one was paying Karen the least attention.
For a long time she sat in a state of mental paralysis, letting her coffee grow cold. This had been a wasted trip. All those hours on the train from Edinburgh. The cost of it, charged to Derek’s credit card, had seemed excessive, and she had her first and only pang of guilt about it. It didn’t last long. Because words spoken on the beach at Portobello came tumbling back into her consciousness. I knew what he knew.
She had asked her godfather what it was he knew, and he had not really answered her. But if anyone could tell her what was going on, it had to be him. She took her phone out and dialled his mobile. It rang four times before going to messages, but she didn’t leave one. She hung up, and almost immediately her own phone rang. The display told her it was her mother, and she muted the ringer until it stopped vibrating. She sipped on the lukewarm remains of the sweet chemical concoction that passed for coffee, and thirty seconds later the phone vibrated briefly and she knew her mother had left a message.
‘Karen, for God’s sake, where are you? We’re worried sick. I should have called as soon as I woke up this morning and saw that you were gone. You’ve been acting so weird lately, but I never thought for a minute that you’d run off like this. Now the school have phoned to say you’ve been absent for days.’ A sigh of exasperation. ‘Oh, babygirl, don’t do this to me. Call me, please.’ There was a long pause before she hung up, as if she believed that Karen was there, listening, and might respond.
Karen deleted the message and wondered why she didn’t feel at least some tiny sense of remorse or regret. All she could think was that Derek hadn’t discovered yet that one of his credit cards was missing, or her mother would have said something. But it surely wouldn’t be long before he did, and the likelihood was that he would have it cancelled.
She left Starbucks and searched for a cash dispenser. She needed money as a back-up in case the card stopped working. And she had to make a decision quickly about what to do next. The light was fading faster here than it did back home, and she didn’t relish a night spent on her own in London. There was no reason for her to stay. She had already decided that returning to hammer on the door of OneWorld would be a waste of time. A triumph of head over heart. She needed to talk to Chris Connor again. The night train to Edinburgh would get her there first thing tomorrow morning. But she would need to buy her ticket fast, while Derek’s card was still active.
The sleeper left Euston at ten to midnight, the guard’s shrill whistle echoing among the dark rafters of the long, gloomy platform as the train creaked and eased its way out of the station at the start of its seven-and-a-half-hour journey north. Karen found herself sharing a cabin with an over-coiffed middle-aged business woman. She was wearing a grey suit and black high-heeled shoes, and regarded Karen warily. Neither of them was comfortable undressing, and as the lights went out, each lay self-consciously on her back on the narrow bunks, listening to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails, frightened to go to sleep. The rolling stock groaned and complained as the train jerked and shuddered its way through suburban stations, gathering pace with the darkening of the night, and leaving the wealthy veneer of a decadent and decaying south behind them.