The Girl Who Stole the Apple

Elgar shrugged. He had finished his stretching exercises, so he went over to his chair, slumped down into it and shut his eyes. He didn’t have any better ideas. Bridget’s preferred strategy, boring though it might be, was the best one — for the time being at least. Wait and watch Maggie Rogers until something happened. Either she would make a move or Samuel Foulkes would come looking for her again. Elgar was confident — Elgar had a massive supply of confidence when it came to killing people — that he could dispose of Maggie Rogers whenever he chose to do so. But the neat and tidy disposal of Rogers should not, he had been told, be undertaken without prior approval. Him Upstairs had made that very clear.

Elgar looked across at Bridget again. She was still scanning the street. To be fair to her, Bridget w

as a pretty shrewd cookie. And they were agreed on one thing: based on what the deceased Mrs Gupta had told them, it was highly probable that it was Foulkes who had come to the shop. The old woman’s description of a tattoo had briefly confused them, but the rest of her account had tied in with their own assumptions. As for the girl dressed as Snow White, that theatrical piece of distraction was typical of the man. All anyone would remember was that the girl was dressed as Snow White. They wouldn’t be able to provide a meaningful description of the girl and they would barely have noticed him. But it was a dead cert that the girl was the dead woman’s daughter. That was the second thing the midget and he were agreed on. The fact that they didn’t know exactly what she might look like when she wasn’t being a Disney damsel didn’t really matter. He was distinctive enough and if he was now towing the girl around, it would only be a matter of time before they tracked him down. As for the girl, she was an unfortunate complication, because once they had Foulkes in their sights, she might have to be taken into account.

Elgar shivered, appalled at his thoughts. The job was the job, but kids were a different kettle of fish. He had said as much to Bridget, but she had given him one of her looks and delivered another of her sayings: ‘Loose ends are loose ends, and ends left loose will always trip you up.’ He suspected that she had made this one up.

He must have fallen asleep shortly after these ruminations because the next thing he was conscious of was a cloud of perfume. He opened his eyes to find her face looming unpleasantly close. ‘Your turn,’ she hissed. ‘And for your information, I’m pretty sure we aren’t the only ones keeping a beady eye on Ms Rogers.’

* * *

Aside from working two evenings a week at the food store — though that was clearly going to be on hold for a while — Maggie Rogers worked four daytime shifts at an Italian coffee shop in the Cowley Road, called Nico’s Café for obvious reasons. She much preferred this job. For a start Nico was a nice guy. In addition the hours were more civilised, from eleven in the morning to four in the afternoon, after which she often walked the eight minutes to her father’s flat to check on him.

Normally Nico allowed her a short break after lunch, once things had quietened down. It was while she was on this break, taken with a cappuccino and a piece of cake, that she first noticed the guy in the baseball cap. She was sitting in the window, enjoying the weak winter sunshine and flicking through a copy of the Oxford Mail which a customer had abandoned. She barely needed to glance across the road to register the man’s presence. Ever since the explosion, her senses had been on high alert. It was as if time had lurched backwards five years, to the time when being under surveillance had been a part of her life. She had ended up treating it as a bit of a game, deliberately leading her tails a dance until their controllers either decided she was no longer worth bothering with or ran out of budget. She had kept moving, from place to place and job to job, until she was pretty sure she was no longer seen as a threat. She had changed her identity — not so hard with her background — and had eventually moved to her father’s town. There she settled for trying to establish what passed for a normal life — a job, a flat and a boyfriend. So far, she had achieved two out of three. The couple of guys she had dated hadn’t lasted long enough to earn the title of boyfriends, and latterly she had given up on that front altogether, not least because her father had become an increasing source of worry.

As soon as she finished her shift at four o’clock, she left via the front door. The guy with the baseball cap was still there. Previously he had been standing in the doorway of the 24/7, but now he was sitting on one of the pavement tables outside the coffee bar next door to it, pretending to read a book. She headed east. At the pedestrian crossing near Tesco, she joined several other people crossing the road. Glancing to her right, she got another glimpse of the baseball cap, bobbing along the pavement opposite. Her suspicions were confirmed. She was confident that she could lose him if she wanted to, and for a moment she was tempted to do precisely that. But she killed the urge stone dead. The last thing she wanted was for him to know that she had clocked him. That was probably the only decent card she had in an otherwise poor hand and she needed to keep it in reserve. Whether it was the police, or someone else altogether, who was shadowing her, she couldn’t possibly know. But she did know that she would make her move only when she had decided exactly what she was going to do. But at that moment, as she turned into a small grocery store to pick up some items for her father, she had only the broad (and somewhat fuzzy) outline of a strategy in her head.

* * *

As Sam Foulkes saw it, the problem with modern communication was that it was too traceable. Emails and texts, Twitter and Facebook, Skype and messenger services . . . communication was everywhere and it was instant. But all these were more or less easy to intercept. All that was needed was a geek or two, dedicated to the task of tracking you down, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail you were done for. Sam had got himself a couple of pay-as-you-go mobiles three months previously, when he had been feeling particularly paranoid and was worried that his calls were being monitored but he’d only used them once, to check they worked. Of course, a mobile wasn’t any use for contacting Maggie because he didn’t know her mobile number and even if he did, they’d very likely have a trace on it. He could ring the café she worked at, but the chances were they’d be listening in on that phone too. He wouldn’t put it past the bastards. Walking into her café in disguise and pretending he was a customer was a possibility, but his height made that a risk. So he’d have to resort to old-fashioned methods. He had used the personal ads in the past, but those left a public trail, and if he used a code Maggie would recognise, how could he be sure that they wouldn’t work it out too? Whoever they were! Sam suddenly put his head in his hands. One of his voices was telling him he was an arsehole, but that familiar voice was harsh and troublesome and he banished it with a volley of swear words.

‘Sam!’ He turned and saw Beth’s eyes on him. ‘You know Mummy hates you swearing in front of me.’

He couldn’t get used to the way she sometimes spoke as if her mother was still alive and had just gone to the corner shop. Was Beth in denial? Did the memory of Ellie live on in the girl’s head? Or did Beth hear Ellie’s voice? The thought jolted him. She was still a child. He hadn’t heard voices when he was her age. ‘Sorry, Beth!’ he said, hiding his anxiety with a smile and a playful smack on the back of his own wrist. ‘Naughty Sam!’

After that he withdrew into the bathroom and locked the door. But now he was there he had no more swearing to do. He leant over the basin and splashed cold water onto his face. Another voice began to speak. ‘Maybe Beth is the answer.’ The voice was female and kind and persuasive, a mixture of Ellie and his own mother. It was the only voice he trusted. He stared into the mirror and saw the chaotic hair and the stained T-shirt, and realised that of course Beth was the only answer.

* * *

Beth was finding it hard not to burst out laughing. But she knew she mustn’t. She needed to keep calm and do exactly as Sam had said so that no one could possibly guess that she was the little Snow White girl who had been in the shop just before it had exploded. She had heard the bang as they hurried away, but Sam had grabbed her hand and told her not to look back, which of course she had. She had seen fire coming out of the door and had wanted to stop and watch, but Sam had dragged her round the corner.

There had been pictures of Snow White on the front page of the newspaper. Not her dressed as Snow White, but the real Snow White from Disney. Sam had been pleased when he saw it. ‘That means they haven’t got any photos of you, Beth.’

She didn’t really understand why he was so pleased. Wouldn’t it be nice if she was on the front page of the newspaper, or even on TV? Everyone wants to be on TV, don’t they? After all, the explosion was nothing to do with them.

Sam was taking a bath. That was unusual. She couldn’t remember him having had one for ages. Half the time he didn’t even take a shower. Sometimes he’d get very smelly. Tonight, for example, he had smelled worse than a skunk. She had said so and he’d laughed.

‘Mummy doesn’t like you to smell,’ she had told him. ‘We’re not hippies anymore.’ Sam had disappeared into the bathroom. Beth had assumed he was going start shouting into his phone again, so she was really surprised when she heard the taps running. He was definitely filling the bath! Soon the taps were turned off and it all went quiet. He wasn’t doing any shouting. She went and stood close to the door. After a while she heard him singing some ancient pop song. ‘Hey Jude!’ he sang. She giggled, though not at his singing. As she turned away from the door she had seen herself in the dressing-table mirror again. She couldn’t believe what Sam had done. It was crazy!

CHAPTER FOUR

Maggie spotted the message while she was eating breakfast. She was studying Ellie’s letter again. The anxieties which had welled up in the Magic Café the previous day resurfaced. Unlike Sam, Ellie was not the paranoid type. If she had written to Maggie to tell her she was being followed, then it was very likely that that was the case. But what the hell could Maggie do about it?

She put the letter back and frowned, studying the envelope for clues. The careful script in aquamarine ink, slightly smudged. The first class stamp. The postmark — definitely London, as she would expect.

Maggie turned the envelope over. She smiled. On the back, as always, was a stamp proclaiming Ellie’s latest allegiance: ‘I love Trident.’ She frowned. The last time, on her birthday card envelope, it had been ‘Animals have Rights too.’ And a couple of years before that, the familiar ‘Stop the Bloody War.’

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I love Trident? ‘To Hell with Trident’ would be more like Ellie. Or was it a heavy irony? Maggie felt her throat tighten and her eyes moisten. Why oh why had they ever fallen out?

That was when she spotted it. Half-hidden and camouflaged by the Trident slogan, written in pencil, so lightly inscribed, so faint that even if the slogan had not been there it would have been easy to miss. Maggie lifted the envelope closer to her face and squinted. Six words. Intended for Maggie alone, and no one else.

Maybe I should retire soon?

Was it a joke? Retire? Ellie was only thirty-three or thirty-four. Retire from what? Ellie, like Maggie herself, had trained as a teacher, but neither of them had lasted the pace. The problem was they had both been rebels, more interested in protesting against adults than teaching kids to be obedient. Had been rebels? Or still were? Maggie had suppressed it for nearly five years now, telling herself that marching, living in trees under the threat of destruction or chaining herself to railings were all futile gestures. Governments still went to war, bypasses were still driven through fragile ecosystems and pharmaceutical companies still used animals to test their drugs.

But what about Ellie? Was she retiring from the protest world? Was that it? If she was aware of being under surveillance, maybe she had decided that enough was enough. Beth was growing up and it seemed that Sam had become a semi-permanent fixture in her messy life. Maybe in the circumstances she had decided to give up all that protesting and settle for being an ordinary, boring, law-abiding nine-to-fiver. It made a depressing sort of sense, though somehow Maggie couldn’t quite believe it.