Dirty Aristocrat (39 page)

With a cry I race to my phone and call Queenie. She is my grandmother’s friend. A woman with a great gift. The spirits talk to her through the cards. I call her and I am weeping.

‘Come now,’ she says.

She lives in a caravan on a field. I get into my car and drive the twenty miles to her. I park my car at the edge of the field and walk quickly to her home. She opens the door in her dressing gown and invites me in. Her face is round, the eyebrows plucked clean and penciled with brown eyeliner. Underneath them are a pair of large black eyes with a rim of white between the pupil and the lower lid that gives her face the look of a victimized saint. Her mouth is small, the lips shriveled. On Brighton Pier she is known as Madame Q, a charlatan, and loony bin.

I climb the steps and enter her abode. It is spotlessly clean and the sun is shining in through the net curtains, but it is full of mysterious shadows. It reminds me of my grandmother’s caravan—same net curtain, same love of crystals, little painted porcelain figurines, and potted plants on the windowsill.

‘I’ll make some tea. Or would you like something stronger?’ she asks.

‘Tea,’ I say quickly.

She nods and puts a kettle on to boil.

‘Sit down, Mara. You’ll wear my carpet out,’ she says, pouring tea leaves into a teapot.

I stop pacing the tiny area and sit on a dainty sofa with embroidered, tasseled cushions. My leg shakes. It always does when I am nervous or frightened. It shook when my mother was ill, and it shook uncontrollably when Jake used to go out in the night to take care of ‘something’.

She pours boiling water into the teapot and, placing it on a tray that she has already set with dainty cups and saucers, a milk jug and a sugar bowl, carries it to me. She puts the tray down on the small table in front of me, sits back and looks at me with her large, soulful eyes.

‘We’ll let it sit for a moment, shall we?’

I nod gratefully. ‘I’m afraid for my son.’

‘Let’s see what the cards say.’

‘Yes. Please.’

She reaches under the table and takes out an old wooden box. It is carved with intricate patterns. She puts it on the floor next to her legs and takes the cards out. They have strange markings on the back that are almost obliterated with use, and yellowed dirty edges. She shuffles them lovingly in her gnarled hands—the arthritic knuckles are the hue of church candles. She hands the pack to me.

I take it with frightened hands. Many times in my life the cards have revealed true things about my life—some small, some vitally important, some painful.

‘Think of him,’ she instructs.

I shuffle the cards and think of Jake. Deliberately, I think of him looking happy. I think of him strong and vital. I don’t infect the cards with my own fear and worry.

‘Give them back to me when you are ready.’ Her voice is level and diagnostic, and as pitiless as an immigration officer or prison warden.

I shuffle the deck one more time and give the cards back to her.

She takes them and spreads them into a semicircle on the table. ‘The Black Madonna protects you. Let your cry come unto her,’ she says softly.

I make the sign of the cross over my chest.

‘Pick only one.’

I ignore the creeping sense of foreboding and choose a card.
The lovers
.

She glances at it with a carefully blank expression. ‘Pick another.’

I take the card that is second from the last on the left-hand side and hand it to her silently. My heart is thudding against my ribs. My hands are clasping and unclasping incessantly on my lap.
A diabhal.
The devil.

She looks at the card and raises her eyes appraisingly toward me.

‘One last card.’

I close my eyes and let my trembling hand hover over the semicircle. With a prayer in my heart I fish one out. I hand the card to her without looking at it, but I already know. Something is wrong. Very wrong.

She frowns at the cards. It’s a hot day but I feel the chill spread over my skin, making my hair stand on end. She lays the three cards down on the table. Slowly she strokes the card in the middle with her forefinger. Her nail is thick and yellow.

‘
An túr
,’ she says. The tower. She doesn’t look up at me. Finally, she raises her martyr’s eyes, her expression portentous, and speaks.

‘Beware the woman who is wounded, beautiful and ruthless. She has soot and death in her mouth.’

My mouth opens with horror at her terrible words.

Her black eyes flash, her voice is a shade fainter. ‘You can still pray to the Madonna for a miracle. The abyss may not come to pass.’ She gathers the cards with a snap. ‘Perhaps.’

There is a sign on the door that can’t be missed.

It reads:

Enter but at your own risk.

                        —Whodini

Lily

T
hat morning Jake gets up early. There is something he must do at the office.

‘Unimportant, but necessary,’ he says when I ask him what.

It is too early for me to eat, but I sit and watch him wolf down three slices of toast thickly spread with butter and homemade marmalade that his mother bottles for him. I walk him to the front door, snake my arms around his neck and stand on tiptoe to kiss him and he lifts me up.

‘I’ll crumple your suit,’ I whisper in his ear.

‘Wrap your legs around me, woman,’ he growls.

I laugh and wrap my legs around his hips.

‘Have I told you today how beautiful you are?’

I tilt my head and pretend to think. ‘Let me see. Yes. Yes, you have.’

He looks into my eyes seriously. ‘You’re beautiful, Lily. Truly beautiful.’

‘Is everything OK?’ I ask him.

He smiles softly. ‘Yes, everything is just the way it should be.’

We kiss gently and then he leaves me.

I stand for a moment looking at the door. A small cold leaf of worry clings to my back
. Is he doing something dangerous today?
I go back to bed and lie down for a while, thinking. Why has he not told me where he is going?

By nine thirty a.m. I have showered, dressed and am closing the front door behind me. I walk to the bus stand down the road, and I sit on one of the red plastic seats and wait for the bus. It comes at nine fifty-two a.m.

I climb aboard, pay the bus driver, and take a seat upstairs. The bus takes me all the way to Leicester Square. I get off and walk up to Piccadilly Circus. It is full of tourists and I sit on the stone steps under the statue and look at them, with their maps and their cameras and their great enthusiasm.

Afterwards, I walk down Regent Street ambling in and out of shops. I try on a hat. When I look in the mirror I find my eyes huge and frightened. I turn away quickly. I flick through the hangers without real interest and my behavior earns me the attention of a security guard, who starts following me around. I leave that shop quickly.

I enter a shoe shop and after trying on about ten pairs I buy a pair. I am outside the shop when I realize I don’t even know what color the shoes are. By now it is one forty-five p.m. I go into a small café and order a salmon and cucumber sandwich, but I am unable to finish it. I pay my bill and set off toward the Embankment Bridge.

As I walk across the bridge I start to feel the first frisson of nervousness. It settles like lead in the pit of my stomach. I have blocked it out all this time, but the moment is here. It is time. I train my eyes not on the Tate Modern, but on St Paul’s Cathedral in the background. Eventually I come upon the giant black insect creature made of metal. Creepy and perfectly War of the Worlds.

I go through the front door of the Tate Modern and up the stairs. Down the corridor there is an exhibition by Marlene Dumas that I would like to see but I don’t go in there. Instead I pass into one of the smaller rooms where a man is sitting on a bench contemplating a collage called ‘Pandora’ by a new artist, Miranda Johnson.

The colors are bright and bold, but there is no difference between this painting and Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’. Both are violent and raw with suffering. To enter the painting is to enter pain. I let my eyes wander over it. There is an eye in the collage, a full pair of bright pink lips, and a flower. There are also words like bitch, suck, liar, arsehole, abuse, and on the very top, cursive writing that says,
You are invited
…

I walk toward the painting, my soul aching.

The man on the bench speaks. ‘She shouldn’t have opened the box.’

I don’t look at him. I simply sit next to him, but not close enough to touch. There are six inches between us. I feel frozen inside. I think of my brother lying on the floor with the needle sticking out of his arm. And I am suddenly caught by his pain, the pain of the painting, my pain. I can do this. Of course I can do this.

I look at the painting and all I can see is the word ‘Bitch’.

‘You called for a meeting,’ the man says without looking at me.

‘Yes.’

He turns his head briefly to look at me. I turn my head quickly to meet his gaze. I want to look into his eyes. I want to stand again on firm ground. His eyes are dark and expressionless. Exactly the way I remember them. I stare at him. He is first to look away.

‘Well?’

‘There is something big happening on the sixteenth,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know yet. But something is coming in through Dover.’

‘Good work, but we won’t act on this one. It will compromise you. We’ll let this one go. You have something far more important to do.’

I swallow hard.

He turns to stare at me. ‘Are you falling for him?’ His voice is hard and cold.

I think of Jake’s skin pressed against mine, his tongue tracing an erotic path to my ear, his lips whispering, ‘I love you, Lily. I never believed anybody could be as beautiful as you.’

‘No. Of course not. This is just a job,’ I say, my insides twisted in a hard knot.

He looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Good. Because you are a servant of the Crown and our best hope to bring Crystal Jake and his criminal enterprise down.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I stand to leave.

‘Keep your wits about you, Hart,’ he cautions.

I don’t turn back and I don’t allow myself to think of Jake. I walk away with the sound of my feet echoing on the hard floors and Luke’s beautiful, helpless face in my mind.

To be continued…

You can find book 2 of the Crystal Jake Series here:

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