Page 111 of The Impossible Fortune
And so I asked him if he reallywasscared about his grandad being in the mine, and he looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘Grandad? No. Grandad can do anything.’
And I thought about Ron, with his knees and his ears and his eyes, and I wanted to tell Kendrick that maybe there was a time when his grandadcouldhave done anything, but that time was gone, and that, right now, he was an old man in a deep hole, and that with every minute that passed I was more and more scared for him.
But honesty only goes so far and so I gave him a squeeze and agreed that his grandad could do anything.
And then I realized that Ron must have known for the last two weeks what had happened to his daughter, and had kept it tightly locked up inside him. I needed to give him a squeeze too, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Right on cue, Elizabeth and Ibrahim joined us. Ibrahim looked at his watch, and then at the ice-creams, and then said that ice-creams are around sixty per cent air, so we were eating air that we had paid for, and I asked him if he wanted an ice-cream too, and he thought for a moment and said that he did, and headed over to the van.
Elizabeth asked us what we had been talking about, and Kendrick said ‘dinosaurs’, and Tia said ‘ice-cream men who sell crack’, and I said ‘nothing really’, and I asked Elizabeth what she had been talking about and she said ‘nothing really’ too.
And then she added that Ron really had been gone a very long time indeed, and it was at that point that Ibrahim returned from the ice-cream truck and said he’d received a message from Ron.
The codes had been correct, the key was in their hands, the mission had been successful.
Which begged the question where on earth was Ron? Because he hadn’t returned.
And, writing this some six hours later, he still hasn’t returned.
It was Elizabeth who asked another question that hadn’t occurred to me but should have.
She asked, ‘What does he mean it’s inourhands?’ Because if Ron hadn’t returned, that meant that Connie Johnson hadn’t returned either.
So that’s where we stand. Either Ron has the key, or Connie has the key, or they both do. And we have no idea where either of them is …
Forgive me, Joanna is calling, and I have a lot to tell her.
I’ll just finish by letting you know that the expert onFlog It!has said that there are a lot of ‘avid collectors’ of Victorian pornography out there. ‘Avid collectors’? That’s what we call them now, is it?
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Joanna types 24 July, her wedding day, into the CCTV, and begins to fast forward through the darkness of the early hours of the morning. At six a.m. she sees Bill Benson arrive through the avenue of trees and disappear into the lodge. Around twenty minutes later she sees Frank East walk in the opposite direction.
What would Joanna have been doing at six a.m. on her wedding day? She was awake, certainly; in fact, she’s not sure she slept at all. Her mum had messaged her at five a.m. and five thirty a.m. to say that she couldn’t sleep, but Joanna had pretended not to see the messages. Why? Well, Joanna supposes she wanted to show her mum that she was a grown-up, and not some sort of excited toddler who couldn’t sleep the night before Christmas.
But that’s exactly what she was that night. An excited child who wanted it to be tomorrow.
She should have replied, shouldn’t she? Should have told her mum she couldn’t sleep either. Then Joyce could have come up to Joanna’s room and they could have lain on the bed drinking hot chocolates and talked about Dad and Paul and love.
Why didn’t she? That’s a very good question. Why does she always push her mum away? There’s something about that relationship, something about being a child, and theneed of a child to be an individual, to be something more than the things she’s been taught and the way she’s been raised. The need to somehow teach a lesson to the person who has taught her so many lessons? Joyce’s love for her is unconditional, Joanna knows that, but, really, unconditional love has a huge flaw. If you love me no matter what, who I actually am doesn’t matter. If someone loves your essence, your very being, what can you do to make them love you more or love you less? Nothing: there is no space. So the only option left to you is to continually prod at that unconditional love, to test it and stretch it, to mock it even.
And it’s not just that. There is a further problem with unconditional love, isn’t there? Because what if you don’t love yourself? What if, like Joanna, you obsess over your flaws and weaknesses, you constantly update the balance sheet of your own personality and find it wanting? Well, then the unconditional love of a parent is a sign that they simply don’t know you. If they truly knew you, their love would be peppered with caveats. ‘I love you, but …’
Since meeting Paul, Joanna has come to understand that all of these things are on her, however, not on Joyce. Joanna should love herself the way Joyce loves her: that is what Joyce has been trying to show her. Joyce is well aware of Joanna’s faults; she doesn’t hide them. But Joyce loves her regardless. Loves her more, in fact, for her flaws.
That’s the love that Paul showed her, and she accepted it, because Paul had chosen her, and she had chosen him. She learned to accept it, and she should now learn to accept it from Joyce. To accept that love, and to show her own inreturn. To stop constantly striving to prove that she was different to the little girl her mother held in her arms.
She should try, at least. She should try, because how nice would it have been to lie on the bed with her mum and talk about love?
There is movement on the CCTV, and Joanna slows it to normal speed.
And so it is that, just as an American business analyst wearing sunglasses indoors is saying, ‘Without an earnings cap the purchase is untenable …’ and Paul is asking, ‘What does “Karl Marx had mad riz” mean?’ Joanna sees Holly Lewis walking down the avenue of trees.
And beside her walks a man in his sixties. What was that name Joyce had mentioned to her?
Joanna has a quick flick through Instagram and immediately finds her answer. A man in his sixties, raising a glass of Champagne to the camera in a tux and tattoos. Well, well, well.
So Holly couldn’t come to the wedding because she had to work. The previous week she and Nick Silver had spoken, together, to a man named Davey Noakes. But on this day, 24 July, when she knew that Nick was out of circulation, Holly Lewis had met Davey Noakes alone, at The Compound.
