Someone Else's Shoes(115)

“What?”

Jasmine looks at her daughter, then nods to herself. “You’re a nice person.”

“What? No, I’m not. Get out of here.” She gathers up the last of the mucky little tubes, preparing to take them back to Cat’s bedroom. Though she could do them both a favor and put the whole lot in the garbage.

“You did a nice thing. There’s a heart in there. And you can’t help it showing up.”

“Ugh. Just . . . clean up your stuff.”

“She’s a nice person. Nisha’s a nice person.” Grace and Jasmine’s voices are singsong and mocking. Over and over she tells them to shut up, but they are still singing it by the time they all go downstairs.



* * *



? ? ?

An hour and a half later Sam walks out of the Harlon and Lewis offices. Andrea is waiting in the car park and she walks slowly across the tarmac in the unfamiliar shoes, her bag tucked under her arm. It is possible Andrea may have been dozing: she gives a little start as Sam opens the door of the Micra and climbs in, closing it with a thunk.

“Well?”

Sam kicks off the shoes in the footwell. She stares ahead, then turns to her. She looks like someone who has had several electric shocks.

“I got it,” she says, her voice trembling slightly. “I got the job.”

They stare at each other.

“Working directly to Miriam Price. And it’s more money than I was getting at Uberprint. I start in a week.”



* * *



? ? ?

Miriam Price leaves the office five minutes later. She walks past the blue Nissan Micra on the way to her car, and sees two middle-aged women bouncing up and down in the front seats, hugging each other and shrieking like teenagers. She pauses to watch, smiles to herself, and turns away to find her car keys.





thirty-five


Carl has tried to call Nisha seventeen times, and every time she sees his name she experiences something that may be hot or cold flash through her. She can’t quite tell. She lies on the top bunk and stares at the phone buzzing silently and insistently in her hand and waits until it stops. Her not answering him will enrage him. You do not ignore Carl. He will know she has the shoes now, because Ari saw her. Aleks has warned her not to answer it, it may give away her location, but it will only be a matter of time before Ari tracks her down. He had got as far as Sam’s house after all.

But she doesn’t want to talk to him until she knows what to do. The others have told her she should keep the diamonds, start again somewhere else. You’ll be set for life! I bet they’ll be worth loads more than he’s offering you! But she knows Carl. It won’t even be about the worth of the gemstones. It’s the fact that it will be unbearable to him that she has won any kind of victory over him. And here is her dilemma: if she keeps the diamonds she at least has some kind of financial security. It is still possible he’ll try to screw the deal, and avoid paying her. But if she keeps the diamonds he’ll never leave her alone. He’ll spend the rest of his life looking for payback.

She remembers one of their circle, Rosemary, a furious, steely-eyed betrayed wife who fought back in the courts until she was awarded an alimony settlement of more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Her ex-husband could easily have afforded it; it was basically his lunch budget. But instead, raging at the judge’s decision, he refused to pay, circling the globe, shifting his assets, and running up year after year of legal costs challenging the decision until, a decade later, she was exhausted and both of them were broke. Some men couldn’t bear to lose at anything. She has walked that afternoon to a place in Hatton Garden where a man suggests they talk in his back office, doesn’t ask where the diamonds came from, and says he can take them all off her hands for eighty thousand pounds. From this she deduces they’re worth at least ten times as much. She had seen him clocking her cheap jacket, his immediate assumption they were stolen.

“I can take them a couple at a time, if that makes it easier,” he said, as she left.

The phone buzzes again. She stares at it.

And finally she picks up.

“I have the shoes,” she says. “You’ll have them when you show me my settlement.”

“You don’t get to dictate terms.”

“Those were your terms, Carl, if you remember.”

He is briefly silent. She can sense his barely suppressed rage at the other end of the line and a faint shiver travels through her.

“Where are you?”

“I’ll bring them tomorrow,” she says. “The hotel. Downstairs in the lobby.”

“Midday. I’m leaving straight after for the airport. So no games. If you don’t turn up, you can stay here with no settlement and rot.”

He puts the phone down before she can respond.

She still finds herself becoming a little shaky when she hears his voice. She lies there, regulating her breathing for a while then shifts onto her side. She has tried Ray twice this evening and he hasn’t picked up. She is just about to send him another text when she notices Grace’s collection of costume jewelry on her mirror, the strings of beads and fake crystals hanging from its corner. And Nisha starts to think.



* * *



? ? ?

Sam is wiping down the work surfaces in her parents’ kitchen. This is not the straightforward job it would be at home, as wiping more than six square inches of the scarred, ancient Formica involves moving jars, piles of paperwork, redundant milk cartons and spare batteries that may or may not have any life left in them but won’t be thrown away as “It’s bad for the planet to have them in landfill.” It has taken her four hours so far to haul the house back into something resembling an orderly state, and she hasn’t yet finished the kitchen.