Scarlet Feather (41 page)

‘Neil, we’ve had a break-in.’

‘Cathy?’ He was mystified. He had thought she was beside him in their bed.

‘Oh, Neil, burglars… the whole place is destroyed.’ There was a catch in her voice.

‘Anybody hurt?’

‘No, but it’s terrible,’ she knew her voice was quivering.

She could see him swinging his legs out of bed as he had so often when phoned at night about a case.

‘You’d like me to come in?’ he said. His voice sounded resigned.

‘The guards are here, it’s very frightening, Neil.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Neil coming in then?’ Tom said.

‘Yes. Do you want to ring Marcella?’

‘No, let her have her sleep, she’ll know soon enough.’

Why had Cathy not done the same thing?

Neil arrived wearing a sweater and a pair of faded cotton trousers, but as full of authority as if he were wearing his full formal barrister’s outfit and carrying a briefcase. The questions were endless and the leads seemed to be non-existent. The guards hadn’t known of any gangs working in the neighbourhood, not anyone specialising in this kind of crime. Back and back they went to the keys and the access.

Finally the guard said, ‘So all I can say is for you to take things up as best you can.’

‘What do you mean, exactly?’ Tom was barely paying attention. ‘We
are
taking things up as best we can, aren’t we?’

‘With the insurance company,’ the guard said.

‘But what has this got to do with finding whoever did all this?’ Tom waved his hand around despairingly.

Neil spoke suddenly in his crisp, barrister’s voice. ‘The garda is pointing out, Tom, that because there were no signs of a break-in or forced entry, the insurance company is going to have to look into the possibility of it being an inside job.’

There was silence in the room. Nobody thought that things could get any worse than they were, but they had now.

It seemed that all night they were cooking Tom’s bread for Haywards partly in the small oven in Stoneyfield while Marcella helped and timed things and lifted out batches, and partly with the better facilities in Waterview with Neil and June helping.

‘What will your Jimmy think about your being out so late?’ Tom asked.

‘He’s had time to get used to it in the past; he’ll think it’s just another party,’ June said succinctly.

The night ended, the bread was delivered and they were back at the premises.

Gradually and slowly they picked through the rubble, pausing to sigh or even cry over a broken treasure. Tom insisted that Cathy put on those big thick mittens they used to take things out of freezers.

‘I can’t feel anything with them on,’ she complained.

‘You’ll cut your hands otherwise.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Listen, Cathy, all we have left are your own good hands if we’re ever going to get out of this mess,’ he said.

The reality of it hit her. They might not get out of this mess. Whoever had done this to them had ruined their life’s work, their dream, their one chance of running a business. She picked up a large, triangular piece of glass and took it to the heap outside. It had once been part of a corner cupboard in the front room. All the big coloured plates it had once held were broken, just as the ones from their old dresser had been flung to the ground.

She felt a great wave of sadness.

Good hands or no good hands they might never build this business up again; nothing would ever be the same. She wanted very badly to sit down and cry like a child.

They had fixed the telephone and it rang cheerfully from time to time, calls from people who had no idea into what devastation their call was being received. Molly Hayes wanted a supper for twelve. It was Shay’s birthday.

‘Can we come back to you on that one, Mrs Hayes, before the end of the day?’ June asked in a bright, businesslike voice.

‘Very busy, are you?’ Molly asked.

‘You wouldn’t believe, it Mrs Hayes,’ said June.

Cathy looked at June with pride. In six short months she had learned confidence and style as well as a lot of other little interests that her silent plumber husband would not have approved of. But she was no longer apologetic and afraid to tell the customers which was filo pastry and which was choux. June could discuss quail’s eggs and langoustines with any of them now. And Cathy gulped thinking that June’s career and future lay in ruins on the floor as well as their own. She watched Neil as he worked with them, helping with the clearing away: his face was grim at the outrage, his energy unflagging, even though he would have to be in court that morning. This was the man whom she had hoped to tell about the pregnancy, but that would have to wait. She paused and looked at him as he squatted in front of the cooker with Tom. They were trying to see how much of the actual fixtures and fittings had been destroyed. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she saw him pointing and Tom pointing and the concentrated effort Neil was making to understand something unfamiliar to him.

Some of the frozen food still seemed very hard, but they couldn’t take the risk of refreezing it. No one could know when the vandals had come in. It could have been any time after six p.m., and they hadn’t discovered it for nine hours. By now the food might be twelve hours out of the freezer compartments. Impossible to know what to do.

When the rest of Dublin was beginning to wake up and go to work, they sent June home in a taxi, Marcella showered, changed and went to Haywards, put on her cool white coat and dealt with the nails of those with the money and time to pay for it. Despite the shocking events of the night, her heart was much lighter than usual. She wasn’t going to be painting and shaping nails always. By the end of this month she was going to have had her first professional modelling work
and
an introduction to a model’s agent. She could afford to smile and be charming to the customers. This life would not last for ever. Neil showered, changed, put on his lawyer’s gear and went down to the Four Courts to represent two men in a wrongful dismissal case. Everyone said that he hadn’t a chance, the two were troublemakers from way back, their case was full of holes. But Neil knew that the company who fired them was on very thin ice; it had an unhealthy history of being anti-trade union. He was going to win and confound them. Nothing to make legal history, and indeed his clients could well be described as highly unreliable, but it was the
principle
of the thing that mattered.

Back at the premises, Tom and Cathy looked at each other, red-eyed.

‘They surely can’t think it was an inside job?’ she asked.

They had been asking each other this all the time.

‘Apparently they could think we did it to get the compensation.’

‘People would think
we
did this to
ourselves
?’ She spread her hands out at the rooms.

‘It’s been done before, when companies were going down the tubes.’

‘But we’re
not
going down the tubes… James could tell them that for one thing,’ Cathy said.

James! They had forgotten about him. Was it too early to ring him? They risked that he would be up on a summer morning just before eight o’clock.

‘James Byrne.’ He was crisp and matter-of-fact when he heard the news. He asked questions, one after the other. The safe? Opened and papers scattered around. Yes. Yes. The guards? Any likely leads? No, no. The plant, cookers and freezers, would Scarlet Feather be able to continue trading? Hard to say. Quite, quite. The insurance? Yes, he assured them, it was all in order and would well cover losses. Then they told him that there had been no break-in, no forced entry.

‘I see,’ said James Byrne.

‘But you know that it wasn’t an inside job, James,’ Tom cried.

‘Yes, I know. Of course I know,’ was the answer.

‘But you mean they mightn’t?’ Tom was hardly able to say the words.

‘Let’s say it may just take longer for them to pay up,’ said James

Byrne. He was thoughtful and quiet. Last night by chance he had had a dinner with Martin Maguire, who had said that he wished those youngsters success in their premises, truly he did, but he felt that there was some kind of curse on the building. Something they would never be able to conquer and survive. James didn’t feel it necessary to report this conversation. Those two had enough to put up with already.

Shona Burke got them permission to use Haywards’ kitchens from now on to do the breads; in fact it worked so well they said it could be permanent. Tom worked until the store opened, and assured the management that he would not use their ovens for his own work.

‘Getting back to normal there?’ the management at Haywards asked him sometimes.

‘Absolutely,’ lied Tom.

Nobody could be told of the shambles that was the kitchens of Scarlet Feather.

Cathy did the entire birthday party, including a chocolate birthday cake for Shay and Molly Hayes in her own house, and no one was any the wiser. No one but Neil, who was more or less dispossessed and had to step over crates and boxes everywhere if he moved, so much so that he set up a table and chair in the bedroom to do his own work.

‘I thought a town house was small, but it seems to have become a bedsitter,’ he grumbled. He was out almost every evening, so they could work on without fear of annoying him further.

They had forgotten how impossible it was to prepare food in such a small space. There was simply nowhere to leave anything down. Every single chair, stool and even suitcase had been pressed into service and used as a surface to store the plates that had been done, but they were always knocking them over. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the freezer or the fridge; ice melted, cutlery fell on to the floor. Each day was more like a nightmare than the one that went before.

June and Cathy worked on and on as they had never worked before. They did a picnic for Freddie and Pauline Flynn; they did two First Communion buffet-lunch parties on the same day, shuttling from one to the other with Con. They left Tom to deal with the business of putting the pieces back together. And this, they all knew, was something that was sheer hell. Men from JT Feather’s builder’s yard came in to clear the premises, but only after James Byrne had insisted on photographs being taken and a representative of the insurance company coming to view the waste and destruction. It was going to cost over two thousand pounds to get the cooking under way again, and this was before they bought a single replacement item for the hundreds of pieces of china and glassware that would need to be replaced. The frozen food had been given away that morning or destroyed; long weeks of work thrown out at just a stroke.

Among the very first people that they should have told were Geraldine and Joe, their backers, the guarantors who had invested in their company. But neither Tom nor Cathy wanted to tell them until it was under control. Not until they knew they were going to come out of this horrible thing. They had the sickening feeling that they were going to go under. It was not a feeling that could yet be shared. Cathy didn’t want to tell Geraldine. To ask her aunt to dig deep again into those pockets lined by wealthy men of whom Cathy had disapproved, and said so. She didn’t want Geraldine to hand over more money. Cathy’s pride had always meant that it was a debt of honour to repay Geraldine’s investment with interest. The aunt who had given her so much, wanting nothing in return except the satisfaction of seeing her do well. The aunt whom she had insulted and criticised about her lifestyle. That was one aspect of it. Another aspect was that she feared Geraldine might say they should pack it all in now, since Cathy was pregnant; that the timing might have been in an odd way appropriate. There was a minefield that she didn’t want to walk into yet.

‘Do you mind if we don’t say anything to Geraldine for a bit?’ she asked Tom.

‘That’s funny, I was just going to say the same about Joe,’ he said.

He didn’t explain because they didn’t have to tell each other everything. Joe was the last person he wanted to talk to just now. Joe who had given Marcella this chance to strut nearly naked across a stage in front of half of Dublin. Joe who had filled Marcella’s head up with the chance of meeting some model’s agent who could put her on his books and get her jobs ‘across the water’, as he called it. Tom hated the phrase – if he meant London or Manchester why couldn’t he just say so? He couldn’t bear to hear his lovely Marcella parroting it all and talking about the opportunity of modelling across the water. Joe who had been so good and generous with his funding; Joe who had obediently become a regular visitor to their parents at Fatima, thus halving Tom’s own need to be present; Joe who somehow felt guilty about this fashion show, would dive into his resources and find funds for Torn as a way of buying himself out of any unpleasantness. Tom didn’t want Joe to know how very near the ropes they were.

So if they didn’t want Geraldine and Joe to know, that meant they couldn’t tell a lot of other people either. Shona was sworn to secrecy, and June was asked to keep quiet as well – there was no problem there. They couldn’t tell Muttie and Lizzie Scarlet, nor JT and Maura Feather. Cathy longed to tell her mother, to go to that familiar kitchen and cry while her mother stroked her hair. But if you told one you had to tell all. There were no accounts of it at all in the evening newspaper, nor did they go on the television programme which tried to get the public to solve a crime. James Byrne had urged caution as he always did, and Neil Mitchell had said the big multinational insurance companies would not be allowed to shelter behind a lot of pious phrases. It was an issue he felt very strongly about. He would fight for them against nameless bureaucrats who always kept the little people waiting for their money. He was already looking up precedents about it, and he wouldn’t let them get away with it. He was being supportive, but Cathy wished more than anything that he had been a different kind of help. That he would take her head on his shoulder and stroke her hair. Tell her that he loved her and that they would get through this. And then she could tell him about the baby.