Frankie (4 page)

‘Should I go in to work?'

‘Christ, yes. You've got to act normally. If they suspect you of anything, they'll be on the lookout for warning signs. Just act as if nothing has happened.'

‘What are you going to do?'

‘Try and find the locket. I've got some friends in the Met. With a bit of luck I'll be able to track down your mugger.' He didn't look very convinced. ‘What else did she take?'

‘My handbag. Oh, and my scarf.'

‘What was in the bag?'

‘Not much. My mobile phone. And my purse. I suppose I'll have to cancel everything.'

‘Not yet,' Carter told her. ‘If she tries to use the phone or your credit cards, we might be able to track her.' He handed her a piece of paper. ‘You'd better write down your bank details for me.'

‘I haven't got any money,' Rosemary mentioned casually as she did so.

Carter took his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and fished out a few notes. ‘That'll keep you going for now. I'll put in a requisition order for some more tomorrow and get it over to you. Come on, it's late. I'll take you home.'

The two of them stood up. ‘And Rosemary,' Carter said quietly.

‘Yes?'

‘You did a great job. Well done.'

Frankie hadn't stopped running since she left the bridge, and although she had managed to shake off her pursuer, she didn't feel any safer for it. Every street seemed to present something to make her heart stop – strangers looking at her in a suspicious way, police officers walking the beat in pairs. And everything she saw was obscured by the tears that would not leave her eyes.

With her good hand she gripped the bag she had stolen, praying it contained enough cash to help her get away; she tried not to think about the pain in her bad hand. She was moving blindly, unsure where she was, but desperately trying to find somewhere that she could gather her thoughts and look through the bag. But there seemed to be people everywhere.

As she turned a corner, she saw the yellow lights and concrete tower blocks of a housing estate. Just one look showed that it was the kind of place respectable people avoided, especially at this time of night: the children's playground had been neglected; car windows were broken and their stereos ripped out. There was nobody about, but it was not just because of the cold – it was only a certain sort of person that loitered alone after dark round here.

Frankie felt right at home.

She headed for the outside staircase of one of the towers and hurtled up it, knowing from experience that there would be a hot-air vent at the top, somewhere she could take shelter for a while. Her footsteps echoed as she stamped her way up the twenty-two graffiti-filled floors, not stopping for breath until she reached the top. The lock of the door leading on to the roof had been vandalized, and the door itself was half open, swinging
slightly in the wind. She climbed up the short flight of metal steps that led to the door, tentatively opened it a little further, and was relieved to see that the roof was deserted. By now, her body was screaming out to her for rest. The material she had wrapped around her hand was saturated with blood, which was dripping down her fingers, and as she collapsed on the roof she was overcome with exhaustion; she sat there for what seemed like a lifetime before she raised her weary head and looked around.

The lights of London were spread out beneath her. She could see the bridges crossing the river – they were hazy through the snow, but distinct nevertheless, and the cars that were crossing them seemed to move more slowly than they were actually travelling. Up here there was no sound other than the low hum of the hot-air vent that had melted all the snow around it. Frankie went over and sat beside it, huddling herself up into a ball.

How long she stayed like that she didn't know, but it was long enough for her shivering to subside in the warmth. Eventually she looked up again, and breathed in deeply as she tried to focus her mind on what she needed to do next. Rosemary's bag was lying beside her; her scarf was wrapped round her neck. Using her good hand she fumbled at the clasp of the bag with difficulty and fished around inside. The first thing she touched was a mobile phone. It was an old model, unfashionable, though Frankie was not to know that: in the days when she owned a mobile phone, it would have been the height of style. She put it to one side and tipped the remaining contents of the bag on to the roof. A set of keys, some loose make-up, a purse and a packet of tissues. Quickly she rifled through the purse: a ten-pound note, a few coins
and a couple of credit cards. Damn it. She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the concrete wall. This wasn't going to be enough to get her anywhere. She flicked through the purse a second time, hoping she might have missed something; but her first search had been thorough enough.

Ten quid. It would buy her food for a couple of days, but was not nearly enough to get her out of the city. Suddenly she remembered the locket that she had tugged from her victim's neck. She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it carefully. It was silver – or silver-plated, more like. Maybe she could hawk it for a few pounds. But not tonight – there would be nowhere open, and those places always had security cameras. She was going to have to think of another way to find some money. The credit cards seemed to be her only option, but she knew she couldn't risk using them to buy anything. Aside from the fact that there was no way she could practise the signature on the back, the state she was in was bound to arouse suspicion if she tried using them. And they'd probably been cancelled anyway …

Frankie felt the tears welling up in her eyes again as the hopelessness of her situation became clearer by the second. She couldn't go to the hostels or the soup kitchens – she'd be spotted in minutes – and the only safe places on the street had CCTV and a police presence. A huge sob racked her body as she realized the truth: she was totally alone. More alone than she had been these past few years, when the solitude of life on the streets had been tempered by the uneasy camaraderie that existed among the homeless. It might have been a camaraderie based on self-preservation, on lying to others about your
past and to yourself about your future; but it was friendship of a sort.

Now there was nothing, no one – how could it have come to this? More than anything, she wanted her dad. In her mind's eye she saw his thin, gaunt face. In Frankie's memory it was always as pale as the last time she had seen it, never the ruddy demeanour of a man in rude health, as he had been before his body had been eaten up by cancer. And as it had so many times before, their last conversation echoed in her head. ‘I love you more than anything in the world, Francesca.' He had started to weep then. ‘Look after your mother for me. She needs looking after.'

Frankie had been unable to speak. Her wide-open, nine-year-old eyes just looked at him.

‘And look after yourself,' he had continued, before dissolving in a fit of coughing. Frankie had been led from the room kindly but firmly by a nurse. The next time she saw her father he was dead.

She had had more conversations with her father than she knew how to count since then, in her head and under cover of night. Sometimes she had been angry with him for leaving her; at other times she pleaded with him to do the impossible and help her. And somehow, without any doubt, she knew what he would want her to do at this moment: to pick up the phone and call her mum. She gazed through her tears at the mobile phone next to her. Home was just a phone call away. But gradually, involuntarily almost, she shook her head. It didn't matter what had happened: she would disobey her father today as she had done every day since she left.

There was no way Frankie was going home.

Her mind started entertaining a more elaborate scenario. Maybe she should just use the phone to call her victim and offer to return the cards and the locket for a reward of a few extra pounds.

It was madness, of course. But fear and pain had overtaken her, and she was ready to consider anything. She picked up the phone and started flicking through the numbers stored in its memory.

ASHWORTH, DIANE

CLARKE, PETER

DAD

EDISON, GEMMA

GOLD

HOME

That was it. Her home number. Frankie's finger hovered above the call button. She knew she shouldn't do this, but she couldn't think of another option.

She paused briefly when she suddenly realized what she had just read.

GOLD

A strange entry – all the others were neatly categorized names. She flicked back to it and inexpertly located the select button: 6139. A four-digit pin. She dropped the phone, picked up the purse and hurriedly pulled out the credit cards. One of them wasn't a credit card at all, just a membership card to a video store in north London. But the other two were a bank debit card and – this was what she had remembered seeing – a Visa gold card. Maybe she had inadvertently found the number for the card. What if the woman kept the number for the other card in the phone as well? She scrolled down until she finally found the word
SWITCH
. Sure enough, it was another pin.

Frankie stood up immediately. She turned the phone off and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans, then discarded everything else apart from the credit cards, money and the locket – she found it too disabling carrying the bag when her other hand was out of action. Carefully she wrapped the scarf over her head in the manner of a shawl, wincing slightly whenever she knocked the cut on her palm. It wasn't much, but at least it disguised her features for a while. Clutching the cards she turned back to the staircase and trotted down.

It took some time to find a cash machine – even on the main streets of this part of south London there was little more than yellow-fronted kebab shops and late-night off-licences, their grilles already pulled halfway down as the owners prepared to shut up shop without losing any last-minute customers. Eventually Frankie came across an all-night minimart, apparently deserted apart from a bored-looking shopkeeper and a couple of people queuing to buy cigarettes. A sign in the window shouted out
CASH MACHINE HERE
. Frankie took a moment to draw breath, then stepped inside.

As she entered, she felt everyone's eyes on her. The shopkeeper allowed her to walk past the counter, then gestured to a colleague who was standing in a doorway at the back of the shop. The colleague – older, slightly fatter and with a proprietorial air – followed Frankie to the red and blue stand that housed the cash machine, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was watching her every move.

Frankie tried the gold card first. It jammed as she tried to insert it into the slot, until she realized she was holding it the wrong way round. She tried again and, reading the
instructions on the screen carefully, she punched in the pin number she had found on the phone. The keypad beeped slowly as she completed the unfamiliar actions, holding her breath all the while. Frankie breathed out slowly and with relief when the screen asked her how much money she would like to withdraw. She looked over her shoulder briefly – the owner was still at the end of the aisle, his arms folded and his eyes directly on her – then turned back again, typed in 5 … 0 … 0 …
ENTER
, and waited.

The cash machine beeped.
MAXIMUM WITHDRAWAL AMOUNT
250. Quickly Frankie tapped at the screen again: 2 … 5 … 0 …
ENTER
. The machine started to whirr, spat out the card and then delivered a thin wad of notes. She snatched them quickly and stuffed them into a pocket. She began to insert the second card into the slot. As she did so, she felt a hand grip her shoulder firmly.

She stood absolutely rigid, her arm still outstretched. ‘Come on, darling, I haven't got all night,' a voice slurred behind her. She turned round to see a gruff old man. His skin was black, his stubble curly and grey, and he leered at her before coughing and then spitting out on the floor. She instantly recognized the drunkenness in his bloodshot eyes. Normally Frankie took such people in her stride, but not tonight. ‘Get off me!' she shouted hysterically, pushing the old man's hand from her shoulder and raising her arm in self-defence.

‘OK, you two, get out, now!' Suddenly the shop owner was upon them, pulling at Frankie's clothes as he dragged her from the store. Frankie didn't resist; the old man did. In an instant the owner had let go of her and with his colleague was restraining the drunk's flailing arms and
shoving him towards the door. They hadn't forgotten she was there, though. ‘Get out, now,' the owner repeated. ‘If I see you in here again, I'll call the police.'

But Frankie was already running from the shop. Once on the pavement she looked left and right, her brain a mass of confusion. She ran in the direction that seemed to be more populated, slipping occasionally on the icy pavement but managing to stay on her feet, desperately looking for a taxi. After ten minutes, she spotted a black cab driving down the opposite side of the street, its yellow
FOR HIRE
light glowing. Frankie waved frantically at it, shouting at the top of her voice, but it drove straight past her, stopping fifty metres down the road to pick up a more well-heeled passenger. ‘Bastard!' she shouted, before collapsing on a street bench and burying her head in her arms. ‘Bastard,' she wept quietly to herself.

But as quickly as she collapsed, Frankie stood up. She knew she didn't have time for this. Again she looked up the street – not so far ahead she thought she could see the illuminated sign of a minicab firm. She crossed the road and walked briskly towards it. Behind the shop window advertising the firm's phone number in big, blue lettering was a small, cramped office. A fat man with a couple of days' stubble sat behind a glass pane that made him look more like a serial killer during visiting hours than a cabbie. ‘I need a cab to the station,' Frankie told him urgently.