Dead Man’s Footsteps

87

Abby sat in the back of the taxi, re-reading a new text that had just come in. It lifted her spirits and made her smile.

Remember… Work like you don’t need the

money. Love like you’ve never been hurt.

Dance like nobody is watching.

The driver lifted her spirits too. He used to be a boxer, he said, never made the big time but did a bit of training now, encouraging kids into the sport. He had a flattened boxer’s face, she thought, as if at some point in his life he’d hit a concrete wall, face-first, at about a hundred miles an hour. He told her during the journey back from the third rest home she had visited that morning that he too had an elderly mother with health problems, but couldn’t afford the charges of these homes.

Abby couldn’t think of a quotation to text back, so instead she just said:

Soon! I can’t wait. I miss u soooo much.

Xxxxxx

It was shortly after 1 o’clock as they pulled up outside her mother’s apartment block. Abby looked around, checking for any sign of Ricky, but the coast looked clear. She asked the driver to wait and keep the meter running. The first two places she’d seen this morning were horrible, but the third was fine and, most importantly, it seemed secure. Best of all, it had a vacancy. Abby decided she was going to take her mum there right now.

All she needed to do was throw a few things in a bag. She knew how slow her mum was, but she would do it all for her and hustle her out. Her mum might not like it, but she would have to lump it for a few weeks. At least she would be safe there. Abby could not go on relying indefinitely on the services of her mum’s new minder, the redoubtable Doris – whose last name she didn’t even know.

With her mother secure, she could put into action the plan she’d been figuring out during the past few hours. The first part of which was to get as far away from here as possible. The second was to find someone she could take into her confidence. But she would need to trust them totally.

How many strangers could she trust to hold everything she had in the world and not run off with it like she had?

This cab driver seemed a good type. She had a feeling she could trust him if she needed to. But would he be able to keep Ricky at bay on his own, or would he need a couple of others with him? Which meant she would be putting her trust in one person she had known for thirty minutes and others she had never met. That was too big a gamble after all she had gone through to get this far.

At this moment, though, she didn’t have a huge number of other options. The rent on the flat was paid in advance for three months, with two still to run, and that had taken the biggest bite out of her cash reserves. And the one-month payment in advance for her mother’s room at the Bexhill Lawns Rest House this morning, hadn’t helped. She had enough credit left on her card to see her through a couple of months, if she holed up in a cheap hotel somewhere. After that she would need to get at her resources. And to do that she had to evade Ricky.

She thanked God for the sheer luck she hadn’t yet transferred them to her newly acquired safe-deposit box.

She should have realized, from all she knew about Ricky, that he was a wizard with electronics. He’d boasted to her one night that he had front desk staff at half the top hotels in Melbourne and Sydney working for him, passing him the returned plastic room keys of guests who had checked out. Those keys contained their credit card details and their home addresses. He had a willing buyer for the information, he’d told her, and the scam, or rather, data service, as he liked to call it, netted him far more than his legitimate business.

She let herself in the front entrance and walked along the corridor to her mother’s flat. She had rung her mother twice to check she was OK. The first time had been at about 10.30, when her mother told her the locksmith had rung to say he would be there by 11. And the second time was an hour ago, when she said the man was there.

Abby was dismayed to discover that her key still unlocked the door. More worryingly, she saw no sign of any workman having been there at all. She called out anxiously, then hurried across the hallway and into the sitting room.

To her astonishment, the carpet had been removed. The red carpet she remembered from her childhood, that she had cleaned the spilt rice pudding off yesterday, was gone. All that remained were some patches of worn-out underlay on top of bare, rough boards.

For a moment her whole world skewed as she tried to make a connection between having new door locks and the need to take up a carpet. Something felt totally wrong.

‘Mum! Mum!!!!’ she called out, in case her mother was in the kitchen, or the loo, or the bedroom.

Where was Doris? Hadn’t she promised to stay in her mother’s flat with her?

She ran, in growing panic, into each room in turn. Then she rushed out of the flat, tore up the staircase two steps at a time and rang the bell of Doris’s flat. Then she knocked on the door with her fist as well.

After what felt like an eternity, she heard the familiar rattle of the safety chain and, as before, the door opened a few inches. Doris, in her massive dark glasses, peered out warily, then gave her a welcoming smile and opened the door wider.

‘Hello, my dear!’

Abby was instantly relieved by the cheeriness of the greeting and for an instant felt sure that Doris was going to say her mother was up here in her flat.

‘Oh, hi, I just wondered if you knew what was going on downstairs.’

‘With the locksmith?’

So he had arrived. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s getting on with the work, dear. He seems a very charming young man. Is anything wrong?’

‘You checked his ID, like I told you?’

‘Yes, dear, he had a card from the company. I had my magnifying lens with me to make sure I could read it. Lockworks, wasn’t it?’

At that moment, Abby’s phone started ringing. She looked down at the display and saw it was her mother’s new number. She looked back at Doris.

‘It’s OK, thanks.’

Doris raised a finger. ‘There’s something burning on the stove, dear. Pop back up if you need me.’

Abby took the call as Doris closed the door.

It was her mother’s voice. But it was all trembling and wrong, and breathless, as if she was reading from a script.

‘Abby,’ she said. ‘Ricky wants to speak to you. I’m going to put him on. Please do exactly what he tells you.’

Then the line went dead.

Abby frantically redialled. It went straight to voicemail. Then almost instantly she had another incoming call. The display read: Private number calling.

It was Ricky.