The Turning Tide (8 page)

The reporter nodded. Keeping Rab’s unemployment status a secret from the press hadn’t been possible. But, if anything, it sweetened the tale for the papers. Rich people becoming even richer are hardly news – middle-class couple falls on hard times, then lands a windfall? That’s the stuff tabloid dreams are made of.

Eventually the questions dried up and the press started packing their cameras away. Erykah excused herself and went upstairs. Her bag still sat in the corner of the bedroom where she had left it, a dense hole drawing her gaze in each time she came in to hang up new clothes or check her make-up. She looked away. Now was not the time.

Erykah turned the brushed steel handle of the bathroom and locked herself in the en-suite. She scrolled through the missed calls and messages. Six of them were from Nicole. Shit.

She dialled back, heart thumping. She started to walk the bathroom floor. The phone rang and rang. Please don’t pick up. Please don’t pick up. What was the point? There was nothing she could say to make the situation better. The black bag wasn’t the only thing she was trying to avoid. Erykah had bottled it. She felt like a coward. She was about to hang up when Nicole finally answered.

‘It’s me,’ Erykah said. She felt dumb for saying it; of course Nicole would know who had phoned.

A long sigh. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I can’t talk,’ Erykah said. Her heels clicked on the polished limestone floor as she paced the short distance over and over. She tried not to think about Valentine’s night. Had Nicole been sitting at the farmhouse table in the cottage waiting, before finally blowing out the candles and going to bed alone? Had she drunk the wine she’d bought, reading and rereading Erykah’s terse final text
Can’t come – talk
later
?

‘I saw a picture of you on the news.’ A pause. ‘Are you coming to training tonight?’

Erykah’s stomach churned. Why wasn’t Nicole yelling at her? Or even asking where they stood? Nicole’s even, flat American accent made it worse somehow, made Erykah feel more guilty for standing her up. ‘Probably not tonight. I’m sorry.’

‘Mmm.’ Nicole did not sound surprised. ‘Your husband looks different from how I pictured him.’

‘Does that matter?’ Erykah said. Nicole had been the one to always shut down discussion of her married life in the past.

‘No, not really,’ Nicole said. Erykah thought she could hear an echo, like she was taking the call in the club changing rooms. ‘So where does this leave us?’

‘Leave us? Nothing’s changed. God, Nic. It’s only money.’

‘Only money, yeah,’ Nicole said. Another extended pause. ‘You looked happy.’

Erykah glanced in the mirror and watched as her lips drooped into an involuntary frown. ‘It’s just a photo,’ she said. ‘Nothing has changed between him and me. Not really.’ She sounded surer than she felt. ‘Don’t make me feel guilty about being married, you knew this from the start,’ Erykah added, and instantly regretted saying it.

Nicole did not rise to the bait. ‘I hope you make it to training tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Erykah said.

‘Don’t you always,’ Nicole said.

Erykah hung up. It was unfair to make her feel bad for something that was out of her control. She should never have rung back. These were the kinds of conversations best had face-to-face, not over the phone. Why get so bent out of shape over a photo? Couldn’t Nicole tell it was all fake? But she also imagined how she would feel if Nicole was splashed all over the news laughing and hugging someone else. She would feel like dirt.

Rab tapped on the toilet door. ‘They’ve gone. The reporters are gone now,’ he said.

Erykah slipped the phone away, unlocked the door and poked her head out. ‘Well, that was a hell of a day,’ she said. They went back down to the sitting room where the prop pillows had been left behind. Rab slumped on the sofa like a marionette with its strings cut. Erykah switched on the radio.

‘Please, don’t,’ Rab said. ‘The last thing I can take right now is more – more news voices.’

‘Fine.’ Erykah turned it over to a classical music station. The jazz-tinted flutes and slithering piano of Ravel spread into the corners of the room. She hated Ravel. His music sounded to her as bland as the walls and furnishings, a poor imitation of the passionate music it aped, a highly mannered pastiche of a living, breathing thing.

‘There are more of them coming tomorrow afternoon, you know,’ she said. ‘And we haven’t had the investment advisors from the lottery company yet.’

Rab nodded, but his eyes were unfocused and his mind was clearly elsewhere.

‘You can do this.’ She sat next to him on the sofa and crossed her legs. ‘Today went well. Really well. A few days, a few photos. And then it’s tomorrow’s chip paper.’

It was the exact phrase he had said to her once, a long time ago, when she’d felt as though her life was spinning out of control as it was plastered all over the headlines. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but she couldn’t think of anything else to offer. ‘And then we can talk about what to do next.’

He nodded again but said nothing. It had been years since she’d felt that he was trying. She had married him because she needed someone who made her feel safe but as soon as the ring went on, it was as though he stopped caring.

Maybe if she had been a better person, he would have behaved differently. Maybe if she had been more like his ideal. He used to talk fondly about the kind of girls he had known when he was at university, blonde medical students who loved skiing and fishing, the ones who had ‘turned down better men than me.’ But if that was what he’d wanted, why had he chosen her? And would girls like those have accepted his terrible memory and lack of effort, like the time he brought her back a half-eaten bar of white chocolate after a business jaunt in Mayrhofen?

No, she mused, probably not. They probably would have gone with him, and expertly plied the off-piste itineraries, charmed his clients, worn cosy socks and known what après-ski was.

When they argued, he would berate her for not being a better person. There was a Good Erykah, he would tell her, and when she was that person she was amazing, but he couldn’t deal with Bad Erykah. The one who let her past and her choices weigh her down like a diving vest.

It was strange to her, his preoccupation with a ghostly, better version of herself. He talked about Good Erykah as if she was a common acquaintance of theirs, some kind of role model. Did that person even exist? He couldn’t seem to accept that she had faults, and she wondered what sort of vision of her he had built up in his head before becoming disappointed with the real person he married.

And by that time she had no one else to rely on. Not her mum, not Grayson. No one but herself.

‘What do you think the stories will be like,’ he said. ‘Will they find out. You know, about your . . .’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Depends how curious the journalists get, I guess. As far as I know it’s not on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find out if they want to.’

She remembered, with bitterness, how she had been told to leave the university after the trial. Jump before you’re pushed – wasn’t that what the Dean had said?

And then trying to find work in IT, which was a joke. When she’d started as a student she had found that she already knew things a lot of the others on the course didn’t. Little skills like setting up networks and
TCP/IP
protocols. She taught herself a lot of skills on top of the degree courses: database admin, web design.

With websites starting to catch on, there were still more jobs than there were people with the know-how. Not having a piece of paper should not have been an issue, people with fewer qualifications than she had were walking straight into good careers. But for some reason she wasn’t as lucky. She suspected it was because too many people still recognised her. It was never openly discussed, just a feeling she got. A mood. She lost count of the number of interviews where a panel of white men sitting behind a table told her she was great but ‘not quite what we’re looking for’.

Rab had been sympathetic the first few times she failed to get a job. After that, he started saying it must be something she was doing, an attitude she was giving off that made them reject her. He told her she needed to work harder. Pull up her bootstraps. Screw her courage to the sticking place. Go once more unto the breach. And all the other empty lines he offered in place of understanding.

So she threw herself into training for GB squad selection. Trying to worm her way back into that world. But her moment had passed, if it ever even existed. She did well in the five kilometre trials, but struggled against bigger women in the shorter distances. One coach suggested she try to diet down to lightweight, but on her almost six-foot frame, that was a disaster. By the time Erykah was able to admit to herself that she didn’t stand a chance against the younger rowers coming through, she was already old enough to be in the veteran squad.

‘You’re ashamed?’ she said to Rab.

He shrugged. ‘Curious what angle this will take.’

Erykah pursed her lips. They had made no secret of Rab’s employment status to the press, so it wasn’t as if his past was sparkling white either. And she could wave off her indiscretions as the actions of a young woman. His affairs over the years, or whatever else the press didn’t yet know about her husband – and she included herself in that circle of ignorance – those would be tougher to explain away when they came out of the woodwork. That’s what always happened when people won the lottery, right? Folks from your past came out of nowhere with their arms wide open, hoping for a piece of the windfall.

She wondered if she might hear from Rainbow. It had been years, and she had no idea if her mother was alive or dead. She hoped she wasn’t dead. But she didn’t fancy a family reunion, either. Not after Rainbow had sold stories to the press during Grayson’s trial. There were a lot of things her mum had done over the years, a lot she could overlook and sometimes even forgive, but that, for Erykah, had been the final straw.

Rab looked at her. His blue eyes were ringed in red, the pupils like the beady pinpoints. ‘I can’t do this,’ he said. ‘The money . . . I can’t do it.’ His voice sounded fragile.

‘Rab—’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night.’

‘I couldn’t sleep either,’ Erykah admitted.

‘I thought about coming into your room, but—’

‘No.’ Whatever else, she was not going to roll over this time. She knew that she couldn’t trust him. ‘We need to screw our courage to the sticking place, Rab. It’s only for a week.’

She had meant the line to be grimly ironic, but he nodded as if it was wisdom from a hilltop guru.

When she looked at him now it was like looking at someone she had only briefly known, long, long in the past. What had she seen in him? She shouldn’t have jumped into the marriage. She knew that. But she was still wounded from what had happened with Grayson when they had met. Marry in haste, regret at leisure – wasn’t that what people said? Wasn’t it the kind of thing Rab would have said, if it had been about anyone else but him?

Maybe he did say it, for all she knew. Behind her back. To his family and colleagues. To the interns and new hires he bedded year after year. Maybe it was another one of his scripted lines, another polished little nugget of ersatz wisdom, designed to pacify anyone who didn’t scratch the surface too hard.

Too late she had realised her husband was not, as she had first believed, deep. He was many compacted layers of shallow.

Well, what could she say now? They sat parallel on the sofa like a pair of dolls. A pair of dolls holding a lottery ticket worth twenty million pounds. Rab clutched a Keep Calm pillow so hard that his knuckles turned white. The tinkling sound of piano filled the room like snakes.

: 7 :

‘It’s only eleven,’ the landlord said to the silver-haired man with the handlebar moustache. He selected a pint glass and pulled the first draught of the day. The room, decorated in red tartan and polished dark oak, was empty apart from the barman and the fellow in head-to-toe Barbour leaning on the bar with a fiver in one hand and a newspaper in the other. ‘You’re druthy for a morn.’

‘Pardon, what?’ said Major Whitney Abbott.

‘Thirsty,’ the barman pushed the pint glass across the bar. ‘You’re thirsty for so early in the morning.’

‘Yes,’ the Major said. ‘My wife would be dragging me up and down the high street otherwise.’ The prospect of touring the dismal shops of Cameron Bridge, followed by stilted conversation over tea and cakes, did not appeal to the Major. Visits to their holiday abode in the Highlands rarely deviated from the same boring formula. She would likely squeeze in a visit to the town’s museum as well, which as far as he could tell contained the same dull exhibits on nineteenth century tweed weaving it had contained the other two dozen times they had been inside.

Whitney Abbott had long grown to despise the company of his better half, who seemed to choose her leisure activities specifically to irritate him. ‘I told her I had some work to catch up on.’

‘Aye, good call,’ the landlord said. ‘Leave the shopping to the lasses. Scunnered of it maself.’ The Major nodded. ‘I was meaning to ask—’

The Major flashed his dentures in a well-practised smile. ‘Am I Major Whitney Abbott? Why yes, yes, I am,’ he said in an impeccably posh accent. ‘Have you read my book?’

The memoirs of his time with the Royal Marines in the Falklands had been out a few years, but failed to trouble the bestseller list. Initially the publisher had hoped the book would gain some positive reviews and attention based on the fact that Abbott was the hero son of a WWII legend. What they hadn’t expected was that revelations that Abbott junior was shagging his ghost writer would take over the headlines instead.

It was uncomfortable to see the allegations splashed everywhere – he still referred to them as allegations, although everything that made it into print was true, or at least true enough. The frustration was that, instead of interviews about his military career, all anyone wanted to talk about was a bit of rumpy pumpy.

Still, if that meant the average man on the street recognised him, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe the fellow had a copy handy and would like the Major to autograph it.

The barman shook his head and pointed at the Major’s crotch. ‘Nah, I was sayin’, do you hear that noise? Man, I think yer phone’s buzzin’.’

‘Oh, right. So it is,’ the Major said. He fumbled inside his sporran for the mobile phone. He had managed to avoid owning one of the things for years, but had recently been convinced to keep it on hand in case of emergencies. Why people these days accepted unsolicited interruptions to their day was beyond his ken.

‘Abbott here,’ he barked into the handset, which rang again in response. He jabbed at it with his finger, ‘Damned thing.’ The Major finally found the answer button. ‘Abbott here,’ he said again, not as loudly.

‘Whitney, it’s me.’ A woman’s voice, Scottish accent. ‘Where are you?’

That would be his darling goddaughter, then. She never had been one for pleasantries. ‘Betty and I are in Cameron Bridge for a long weekend, checking up on the cottage. She wanted to see a—’

‘Fascinating, I’m sure,’ the woman interrupted. ‘When are you back in London?’

‘Tomorrow, possibly the day after,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’ The Major wandered to the bar window. The inn overlooked the decaying town centre with its downtrodden hotels and muddy little square and clutches of visitors snapping photos of the grey waterfront. Tourist buses carried people in and out all times of year, dozens of Canadians and Americans disgorging to have a look around at the shortbread tin landscape, take a couple of photos with a bagpiper on the high street and then climb back aboard to be whisked away to Loch Ness.

‘We have a situation, Whitney,’ she said. ‘The . . . thing I had you take care of over the holidays? Three guesses what turned up on a beach in Scotland yesterday afternoon.’

The Major sucked in his breath. Suddenly a pint of ale seemed entirely insufficient for the occasion. This called for a stiff whisky. ‘No,’ he protested.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear anything about it in the news up there? It was in the paper and on a couple of websites, though they haven’t identified the body yet.’

‘I never read the local news,’ he said. ‘Pointless waste of time.’

‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Well, try not to say that too loudly or too often, if you can manage to do so. I can’t imagine your future constituents would be terribly pleased to hear it.’

‘Do we know anything about the . . . package?’ he asked.

‘Nothing yet,’ she said. ‘It’s in Cameron Bridge mortuary.’

‘How do you know it’s him? If it was only found yesterday. Don’t bodies usually take, I don’t know, months to identify?’ The Major really did not know, although his sinking stomach felt as if he probably did.

‘Maybe, maybe not. But the location. And the news is already reporting it was found in a bag,’ she said. ‘The body is with a pathologist, although from what I understand, she isn’t top-tier.’

Whitney breathed out. ‘Good. Good. Even if it is our man, there may be wiggle room yet.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I hope you understand it’s a situation that I would sooner not be in at all. And that if this is what I fear it is, then you need to be as far away from this as humanly possible.’

‘Goes without saying,’ the Major said. ‘But no plan survives first contact, as we say in—’

‘Yes, yes, as you say in the Corps,’ she finished for him. ‘You’ve mentioned it once or twice.’

Major Whitney Abbott gritted his teeth but said nothing about her dismissive attitude. He needed her more than she needed him. The penny had dropped around the time he found himself giving an after-dinner speech at a banking conference last year. He was rehashing the Battle of Mount Harriet for the hundredth time and noticed the audience looking fidgety and bored where before they had been amused and engaged. When he described what it had been like in the middle of the night, dug into his own trench, eyes searching the dark – that was where he was accustomed to the audience falling silent, reverent, in awe. But it wasn’t happening. Instead of a thousand eyes on him, he looked across the room to see heads bent over the light of a hundred mobiles. The room clinked and jangled with glasses and the sound of cutlery on dessert plates, hummed with vibrating phones replying to texts and calls.

They weren’t interested in war stories. They were there for the scandal, and as soon as he refused to talk about it, they switched off. He might as well have been talking to the bathroom mirror. He looked out over the crowd and saw more than just young people who had never known war glued to their mobiles. He saw the gulf between his generation and theirs. He had committed the cardinal sin of any entertainer – good or bad, you had to hold the room. They had to love you or hate you. Indifference was poison.

Soon after that the slowdown in bookings hit. News shows stopped inviting him to be on panels. Papers sent fewer requests for interviews. He went to his publisher and begged them to reissue the paperback with a new afterword, but he could not nail them down to a deal. Major Abbott’s editor suggested he might have better luck pitching a biography of his famous dad instead. The Major told him where he could stick that idea and stormed out.

So when his goddaughter approached him with a new project in mind, he was in no position to refuse. And it was a doozy.

‘So what do we do now?’ he said. Whatever it was, he hoped it wouldn’t involve the Internet. He had a strong dislike for the Internet and, he suspected, the feeling was mutual.

‘Now? We push the next stage forward.’

‘The shipment, you mean?’ the Major said in a stage whisper.

‘Shipment?’ She sounded confused.

‘You know, the
shipment
,’ Abbott said. They had agreed on a code for phone calls, so why wasn’t she using it? ‘The shipment of expenditures.’

‘Oh, right, that silly code of yours,’ she sighed. ‘You mean the money.’

‘Don’t say it!’ Abbott hissed. He glanced over his shoulder to where the pub landlord was polishing glasses. ‘Anyone might be listening.’

‘Fine, whatever. Organising the shipment. This week, if we can manage it. We’ll announce your bid for Brussels straight away. Start getting coverage for the campaign.’

‘May as well wrap them up into the same event,’ Abbott suggested. ‘Maximise media impact. If I may be permitted to make a suggestion with regards to getting the press corps on side—’

‘Let me handle it,’ she said. ‘Your idea of media attention is reporters papping you and your totty
in flagrante
. Cheers, but I’m on top of this.’

Politics had never interested the Major, apart from an historical and, he supposed, genetic, right-leaning tendency. He had seen too many of their tribe close up to have much respect for supposedly democratically elected leaders of office. Theirs was the breed of man who sat behind a desk and commanded that troops be sent to the front, rather than leading from it.

As he saw it, though, he had few options but to go along with the scheme. His goddaughter was a smooth talker with valuable connections. And he needed a new wheeze or else it would be coach tours and Highland museums with his wife from now until the grave. His goddaughter assured him that, for the price of public representation and being the face of a new political party, he would be all but guaranteed a seat in Brussels.

Once the election was over he planned to spend more time in Brussels and London than in his proposed constituency, enjoying the perks. His mouth watered. He could taste the sweet return to fame. The news panel invites, the Eurostar. First class. He would be back in the headlines, back where it mattered. Not forgetting the women. He had always had a soft spot for the women of the Continent.

‘I need you to do something else,’ the woman said.

‘What’s that?’ Whitney said.

‘I don’t know what the post-mortem will turn up. I hope nothing. But we need to clean up the other end. Make sure no one can draw the connection between him and us. Hit his office, his computer – whatever it takes.’

The Major scowled. ‘Very well.’ Yet again another task being dropped into his lap that shouldn’t be his responsibility. For an uncharitable moment he suspected that his goddaughter had nothing like the resources she had claimed, and that all the people in London and Scotland whose names she had dropped in order to entice him into the scheme were not friends at all.

Outside, the stout form of his beloved wife barrelled up the path to the hotel. Betty, in her cornflower blue top and trousers, clutching a handful of pamphlets advertising local excursions, with a face like a Rottweiler that had eaten a nest of hornets.

‘But get on a train today, Whitney. We need you back in London
ASAP
. Leave Betty up there if you have to. In fact, it’s probably better if you do.’

Whitney smiled at the thought of reprieve from his wife. ‘I will do it as soon as humanly possible,’ he said.

‘See that you do.’ The woman rang off without saying goodbye.