The simplest question of all. And he had laughed at her.
Chapter Forty-Three
Kim stared at the parcel on the floor of her flat. She could not believe it. The cardboard flaps at the top of the box stood upright, where she had cut the tape and pulled them open. Now she was sitting at the other end of her hallway, bum on the hardwood floor, feeling the bones in her hips but unable to move.
The towel had fallen off her ten minutes earlier. She did not gather it. Naked, she stared and stared.
She fetched her phone and texted Edward:
Ring me
Then texted Stevie to see if Edward was with her, then let the phone drop to the floor with a rattle, as if the strength had fled her. As if the contents of the parcel, even at the other end of the hallway, were draining her ability to move.
The delivery had come when she was at home, at half past six, which was a stroke of luck, and she tried to imagine what might have happened if the courier had left it outsidethe door of her flat or, even worse, on the communal steps at the front of the building. Fortunately, they had rung the bell. She braved the shared stairs, having broken off from washing her hair, a towel wrapped around her hair and a larger one hiding her body. Her feet made damp marks on the carpet. The courier was on a motorbike, and he gave her the parcel two-handed and was already wheeling away when she was asking, ‘Do I sign?’
Back in her flat, Kim had dropped the parcel on the floor – it was too heavy to hold for long, and her first thought was a delivery of books. She boiled the kettle for tea. She got back into the shower and made sure all the shampoo was washed out. She sat on the loo and had a wee, then stood at the bathroom mirror naked and plucked out a few stray eyebrows. She must eat a little more or train a little less, the bones abrupt in her face, always her mother’s greatest concern: ‘And I cansee your cheekbones!’
The parcel was almost forgotten. She wrapped the towel around herself, saw it in the hall, fetched the smallest knife from the block in the kitchenette. What could it be?
In marker pen the front of the box said KIM, just her first name. Underneath were her flat number and postcode. There was no return address. ‘By hand’ was written in the top corner in the same black marker. She suddenly thought – bomb. She had seen too many Bourne and Bond films. Bombs were heavier, right? The box was a foot square at the end, maybe a little longer crossways. She took the knife to the line of tape that held the flaps together and saw the money.
She stared and stared. Money? At first she thought there was too much to count. But the notes were in bundles, held tight with banknote straps. She pulled out twenties at first. She flicked through them to check every note was for the same amount.Then Kim went to find her kitchen scales. She counted a bundle of twenties – fifty, so a thousand pounds. She weighed them: 47 grams. Then a bundle four times the size, a whisker under 185 g. Four thousand pounds. She pulled out at least ninety more bundles, some a grand, some four. She weighed a few. All were exact, either 52 g or 185 g. One wad weighed 198 g – she counted each note with fingertip and tongue, and found an extra fifteen notes. Her head spun. But the thicker wads made it easier. There were fifty, along with fifty of the lighter ones, all packed tightly in the box – she made that a quarter of a million in cash.
Her eye went to the layer of green crêpe paper separating the twenties from the rest of the box. She pulled it away gingerly. Now her heart slammed in her chest. The towel had fallen away and she was counting naked. There were wads of fifties. She thumbed through one: fifty notes. £2,500. She weighed it: 46 g. She found another bundle twice as big. The second bundle was £5,000. Then a bundle four times the size of the first. £10,000. Then another forty, another layer of crêpe paper, and fifty more. Then she saw the wads of hundred-pound notes.
On her phone she asked ChatGPT, ‘How much does a UK banknote weigh?’ The answer was instant:UK banknotes, regardless of denomination, weigh approximately 0.9 grams each. This weight is consistent across all denominations, including £5, £10, £20, £50, and £100.
She turned the box upside-down and separated the wads into different denominations. Fetching a mixing bowl from the kitchen, she placed it on the scales and weighed ten wads at a time. She used her phone to make the calculation: £250,000 in twenties; £500,000 in fifties; £260,000 in hundreds. She thought she was heading for a million, but the amount was a little over. The absence of a round total bothered her, until she found the scrap of paper at the bottom of the box.
£1m for the flat, £10k for you.
That was when she messaged Edward. Hearing nothing back, she texted Stevie.
He’s not with me that’s for sure
I’ve messaged him for you. S
Which unsettled Kim. She wondered if the texts might be evidence of her having received this box, which she must tell the police about as soon as possible. But wait – if it was payment for the flat, it was payment for the flat. She hated the idea that those two, that dodgy pair, would be the owners of her perfect penthouse, but this took persistence to a new level. She could not simply send the money back. How did you move a million pounds anyway? She would be fearful even of walking to the car with it.
She had forgotten she was naked. She spooled through the events of the last half-hour to totally understand what had just happened. Doorbell, evening delivery; motorbike courier. (Did he know he was carrying more than a million pounds in banknotes? Had he ridden all the way from the City of London with them? What if he came back tonight, broke in, robbed her?). Carrying box up to flat; towel falls off; box opened, money. Now what?
She hated to be the damsel in distress – hated it more than she could ever say – but she must speak to Edward. Not text, not WhatsApp. Actually speak. He would focus on what had happened, assuming he was not distracted. She grabbed her dressing gown from the bedroom, put her phone in the pocket and dropped into an armchair in the living room where she could have the conversation. She did not put the lights on. The sun was down.
When she looked right along the hallway, she saw the box sitting there, wads of banknotes strewn around it. She chewed her lip, stood up and walked over to the box. She paused for a second, then went to the kitchen and carefully packed the money tightly into a casserole dish, opened the oven door and slid the heavy round dish inside. She closed the oven door. No one would find the money there.
She called Edward.
Edward did not hear the phone. He was on his moped, racing through Sidmouth, mind moving as fast as the bike. In a single instant, in the crash-zoom of pain and concentration that came to him at Matty’s grave, he had moved the case forwards with a leap. If Wendy Wrigley’s Dr Hearst was involved, then Wendy needed to know because she might be in danger. But why would the man have removed the dialysis machine the instant the accident happened?
Evidently the doctor wanted no connection with Malnyk. There might be innocent reasons for that, or there might not.
As he reached Sidmouth’s promenade, the sun was now fully down, the summer sea as calm as a garden pond.
He was opposite the pizza parlour, the burnt-out shell like a broken tooth in a pretty mouth. Local businesses were fundraising for better hoarding, with suggestions including the old cartoon of the bellied man in the bathing costume with a knotted handkerchief springing across a beach: ‘COME TO SIDMOUTH!’ To Edward, the burned building spoke of the death of Nina. There was still a faint aroma of soot and carbonized plastic. He switched off his bike and leant it against the waist-high promenade wall. No one would mind it being on the pavement after sundown. In a town where there had been an explosive tragedy, an unlocked moped was still safe after dark.
He tried to call Wendy Wrigley but the phone went to messages. The signal was poor, and it was possible his new number was unrecognized by her phone, so she would treat him as an unknown caller and block him. Damn, that was annoying. Now he saw he had a missed call from Kim. He had that back-and-forth moment, as when you walk along a thoroughfare and try to avoid an oncoming pedestrian, who goes left when you go right, right when you go left; and after left–right, right–left, you both stop and regroup. Kim–Wendy, Wendy–Kim. Eventually:
‘Kim?’
