She upends the bag across the bed. So little, for so much: nineteen bundles, less than a couple of centimetres thick, and one broken one, doubled over in a rubber band. Twice as much, three years ago, but even then it was little enough that it fitted into a sports bag. She takes one bundle in each hand and starts to work her way round the room, searching for hiding places.
Three years ago: red blood on white skin, and stupid Lisa frozen to the spot. Tony laughing by the bar with his whisky glass, the man on the floor coughing up a tooth, a middle molar. It bounces on the carpet, tittups up against his shoe.
Their heads, turning…
All rooms are full of hiding places, if you’re looking. She’s become a past master at finding them. She kept half her money taped in plastic bags to the back of a heavy old commode, in Paris; five thousand pounds in a Tampax box in Berlin. The trick is to remember where you’ve put it, not to lose ten grand when you move on, as she did in Naples. The armchair has a loose cover, to hide the holes and stains beneath. She tucks half a dozen bundles round the edge of the cushion, tweaks the cover to hide the bulge. Goes back to the bed, picks up two more, moves on, thoughts churning.
Should I have run?
She asks herself that every day. Maybe I could have brazened it out, stepped round the curtain and played the hard-face, one of them.
You saw what they were doing to that man. That wasn’t execution. No clean dispatch, no merciful bullet to the head, like a dog. That was torture. That was getting their kicks from watching a man choke to death on his own blood. You saw how they were enjoying it. You think they would have hesitated to use you up for afters?
And what if they didn’t? What if they took you in and made you one of their own? You know you would never have got away, right? No four weeks’ notice and bringing in doughnuts for your colleagues on your last day. Just: life as a possession, always thinking of the consequences for not doing as you’re told. You put yourself in this position the day you accepted that job, she tells herself, even if you did lie to yourself about it. No bar manager gets paid that sort of money. Not unless someone’s buying their silence.
Maybe I should have taken that policewoman up on her offer. Gone in and handed myself over. Surely a life in witness protection would be better, more stable, than this?
The man next door turns off his music and the silence is so sudden that she finds herself checking once again to ensure that she is alone. Upstairs, Cher paces, paces, paces. Collette looks in the cupboard under the sink, finds a butter dish, of all things, covered in greasy dust, and stuffs it full with money. I should get some tape tomorrow. I can stick a bundle to the back of both those drawers; that’ll take care of two of them.
And she knows the answer about the police. Has known it since she started noticing the cash pass through. He owns the police. No one operates that casually, throws his presence about, keeps his profile above the parapet, unless he feels safe. And no one who basically runs a knocking-shop feels safe from raids unless the raiders have been paid off. Someone’s in his pocket, at least one someone. And she doesn’t know who. Never will, even when the knock in the night lets her know she’s been found.
Scarlet blood on white skin, fingers crushed and bent like Twiglets. That won’t be me. I won’t let it be me.
She’s sweating like a mule in the airless room. Stops to run a glass of water, leans against the sink to drink it, runs her eye over her hiding place, looking, looking, for more.
Chapter Twenty-One
Vesta rifles through the post on the hall table, divides it into neat piles for its recipients – whole armfuls each week – gathers the junk for departed tenants into a bundle to put in the bin. It’s not a task that takes long. Half a dozen windowed envelopes for Thomas, a couple – brown paper, official stamps – for Hossein. Something from the council for her – her tax rebate, she hopes. Old ladies, she’s noticed, get less and less mail as pensionable age recedes behind them. Even the Reader’s Digest doesn’t want to give her fifty thousand pounds tax free any more.
Gerard Bright has a postcard, addressed in a childish hand. She mostly notices it because it’s the first piece of handwritten mail to come through the door in a month. She has a cousin in Melbourne who sends cards with clockwork reliability on birthdays and Christmas, though it’s over twenty years since they last saw each other at her auntie’s funeral in Ilfracombe. She sends them back with the same dedication: the last of her family, a single precious jewel among the seven billion. He includes a Xeroxed round robin yarn of children and grandchildren, a second wife and a land cruiser. Vesta just sends good wishes. She has little to boast of. No one wants news of friends they have never met. It’s one of the reasons people have children, that blood relations lend legitimacy to boasting to strangers.