Felicity Young - Take Out

Scanning the street on all three sides of the garden fence, she saw nothing resembling Pavel’s green Jag. At a large house down the road, automatic doors opened for a silver BMW. Another smaller car pulled up opposite—commuters coming home from work.

Back in the house she forced herself to give Col her full attention.

When Lin regained consciousness, he said, she’d backed up everything Mai had told them about the death of the Pavels, as well as confirming that Mai was the mother of the baby. She’d been unable to remember much about the bus crash other than that she’d seen the men arguing just before it happened and Mai trying to pull the knife away from Rick Notting’s throat.

‘That’s what Mai said, too,’ Stevie said. ‘It could easily account for her print on the handle. Mai flatly denied getting off the bus and killing Notting. Even if she’d wanted to, she said she couldn’t because her leg was too painful. I believe her.’

‘But she was covered in red dust, how can that be explained?’

Stevie reached for the brandy balloon and took a sip. ‘That dust could have come from anywhere within a wide radius of the crash site. She told me she’d got dirty when going for a walk during their last rest stop.’

Col sighed down the phone. ‘You’re beginning to sound like a defence lawyer, Stevie.’ And you’re beginning to sound like Luke Fowler, Stevie thought. How much easier it is to blame the whore.

Stevie forced herself to loosen her grip on the brandy balloon. Even if a lawyer could argue provocation or self-defence, the thought that Mai might have to stand trial for murder after everything she’d been through was almost too much to contemplate. She took a calming breath and said to Col, ‘After the crash, when Mai came to, she was disorientated and wanted to find out where they were. She managed to pull herself up on a seat and look out the bus window. She saw the two men, Jimmy Jack Robinson and Rick Notting, lying outside the bus, and a third man stooping over Notting.’

‘Who the hell was that supposed to be? SOCO found no prints other than those belonging to police and paramedics.’

‘Tracks could easily be wiped away from that thin dust.’ Stevie paused. ‘She thinks the man was The Crow.’

‘Bullshit, how come he was there? Why didn’t he go and finish off the girls too?’

‘Maybe he was following the bus; maybe he knew he couldn’t trust Notting? Robinson might easily have called him. Mai said that after she saw The Crow bend over Rick, he walked over to the bus. She ducked when she saw him coming and played dead.’

‘She must have been very convincing. Christ, Stevie, and you believe her?’

Stevie nibbled on her lip and said nothing. Of course she believed her, but why? Because she wanted this version of events to be true, that was why.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Mrs Hardegan’s—telling her about Mai.’

‘Hopefully you can get some sense out of the old lady this time, find out what she has to do with all this.’

Stevie turned from the window, watched Mrs Hardegan purposefully shuffle around the room, banging doors, opening the drawers of her oak sideboard; filling up their brandy glasses. Stevie lifted hers in a silent toast and Mrs Hardegan raised her glass back.

‘You know, Col, this time I think I might.’

Stevie disconnected and dropped her phone on the sewing table next to a stack of recently placed objects: picture cards, magazines, the tapestry, which in the days since she’d last seen it, had taken on Bayeux-like proportions.

‘We said it was all our fault and now we can show you why.’ Mrs Hardegan unfurled the tapestry and placed it across the things on the sewing table. Stevie hastily moved the stool and positioned herself alongside the tall armchair and stared at the tangle of coloured wool before her.

Then, like an optical illusion, the pattern of colours and small exes began to take shape and a crude tableau appeared. A row of blue exes depicted the sky, green, the earth, peopled by stick figures sewn from wool. Mrs Hardegan pointed to one of the figures that stood out from the others because of the messy nest on its head—a hat or thatch of hair—Stevie couldn’t tell.

‘There we are,’ Lilly said, solving the mystery. Next to herself she had sewn three identical figures. ‘The boys,’ she added.

‘Jon, Delia and Ralph?’

‘That is correct.’

The old lady made walking motions with her knobbly fingers across the tapestry from one depiction of herself to another, ending up at a fluffy yellow orb sewn onto the sky.

‘The sun?’ Stevie queried.

‘Yes, the sun—they sent us there to play. It was wintertime here. Cold.’

Stevie stared blankly at the old lady. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

Mrs Hardegan’s pursed her lips. Flexing her fingers she took on an impatient tone. ‘They sent us to that place that has the animals with long noses, very sunny, and we went on a car with wings.’

Leaving the tapestry for a moment, she riffled through her picture cards, withdrawing a child-like picture of an aeroplane. ‘A car with wings,’ she explained as she pointed to several cross shapes hanging upon her tapestry sky.

‘You went on a plane?’

Mrs Hardegan briefly turned her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, clever boy,’ she said as if talking to her parrot. ‘They put us on the car. Paid for us to go here...’ The picture card she reached for now depicted a holiday scene: sea, sand, buckets and spades.

Ah, of course, the sun. ‘They paid for you to go on holiday—where did you go?’

She pointed to a circular tangle of grey wool situated on the brown exes of earth. The grey blob had something long and thin sticking out from its top. ‘We went to the land of the long noses where the snoodle pinkerds live.’ Christ, sounded like something Dr Seuss might have dreamed up. Stevie massaged her brow and tried to think.

Long noses, elephants, Thailand—they sent her to Thailand! Oh God, now she understood. Jon and Ralph had used Lilly as an unknowing escort for their girls, generously paying for her holidays to Thailand. What immigration official would question the papers of a young girl who couldn’t speak English, escorted by an innocent old lady? They’d used her as their mule, in the same way dealers planted their drugs in the luggage of innocent passengers to move them from A to B.

‘We were told they were coming here to work in those zoos belonging to the boy,’ Mrs Hardegan said.

Stevie stared at her hands as she puzzled this out: a zoo, a place where a variety of creatures live. ‘You were told they were going to work at Jon Pavel’s nightclub?’ That was an easy one.

The old lady nodded. Maybe Stevie was getting the hang of this after all. Much of Mrs Hardegan’s language, she realised, did contain a strange kind of logic.

‘And food places,’ Mrs Hardegan said. ‘He makes long-nose food too.’

‘A Thai restaurant?’

‘Indeed. And the boy with the small boy was bringing him over for them to adopt.’

‘So, you escorted several girls over here. But when it came to the girl, Mai, you thought she was bringing the baby over on behalf of the adoption agency?’

‘That is correct.’ Lilly sniffed and pulled a tissue from her sleeve. ‘And then I thought he stayed on to help as a maid person. We did not know he was a prisoner. And then he left and the small boy stayed. We are a stupid, ignorant old boy—all those poor snoodle pinkerds. The boy told us what we’d done and then we had the brain thing. We had to help that snoodle pinkerd and his small one—so very small. He came to see us and asked for our help and when we tried, no one would believe us.’ Mrs Hardegan closed her eyes for a moment. They flew open again as an electrical sound clattered through a speaker in the wall near the chair. The doorbell.