Chapter 40
Tara walked into the Blue Anchor near Fraddon to find it empty apart from Sabri Carter.
Sitting at a corner table, she was wearing what looked like a man’s puffer jacket over jeans and had a beanie cap pulled down over shoulder-length dark hair.
A pint glass of lime and soda sat on the table in front of her.
She looked up as Tara approached and gave a shy smile.
‘Are you in disguise?’ Tara had meant it as a joke, but the other woman’s face creased in confusion.
‘Sorry, I mean – I am.’ Tara’s raincoat was turned up at the collar, her hair tucked inside a beret.
She’d kept her sunglasses on, even though the pub interior was so dim she was in danger of falling over the furniture.
‘Ignore me. Childish sense of humour. Let’s start again.
Can I get you a glass of wine? I know we’re both driving but we can have one, can’t we?
I feel we probably need one. Gosh, it’s dark in here. ’
She was talking too much. She always did when she was nervous.
In a single, graceful movement, Sabri got to her feet.
She might dress from House of Primark but she had a natural poise.
‘Wine would be great, thank you. And we can sit in the window if you like. I’ve got into the habit of avoiding windows the last few days.
There always seems to be people staring in at me. ’
Tara had seen footage of Sabri’s home on the news bulletins. A semi-detached house on the outskirts of Truro, with a tiny front garden that offered no protection from the news crews.
‘Been bad, huh?’ Tara asked.
‘I’m learning what it’s like to be an A-list celebrity,’ Sabri replied.
‘Only without their bodyguards. Work are already seriously pissed off. We found an Italian photographer wandering round A&E cubicles last night and I can’t pull out of the ambulance bay without at least two motorcycles following me. ’
‘Someone was taking pictures of our swim group this morning,’ Tara said, as she and Sabri settled themselves in the window seat with two glasses of Chablis.
‘We get the odd perv doing it, but the camera looked professional. Even when we were changing. I’ll probably see my bare arse on the evening news tonight. ’
Sabri’s face twitched in what might have been a smile but was probably a grimace and Tara told herself to rein it in. Women from Sabri’s culture probably didn’t talk about body parts. Don’t ask her where she’s from, she told herself. Just don’t.
‘You look so familiar,’ Sabri said. ‘I don’t mean from the bay last week. I thought then I’d seen you before, that I knew you.’
‘I was a district nurse for thirty years,’ Tara said. ‘I often had patients in and out of the Royal Cornwall. We probably came across each other a lot.’
Sabri nodded as though it made perfect sense, then said, ‘How are you?’
Where would she start? ‘It’s mental, isn’t it?’ she replied. ‘Even my swim buddies are looking at me like I’ve done something wrong. They think I’m not telling them everything. And no one will believe I’ve never met Logan Quick.’
‘And you haven’t?’
‘No. Not that I can remember anyway.’ She paused. Why come if she wasn’t going to be completely honest? ‘I have met his ex-wife, though. And I spoke to her last night.’
Sabri’s brown eyes widened in surprise. ‘And …’ she prompted.
‘Well, I may have set the cat among the pigeons,’ she admitted. ‘She seemed surprised, to say the least.’
Sabri nodded but didn’t pursue the idea. She said, ‘Have you made an appointment?’
Tara picked up her glass. ‘I’m going on Monday. I was surprised to get an appointment so soon to be honest, so I think they must have cleared the week for us. I asked if I could bring you, but they said no. Has to be one at once.’
‘Thanks for trying.’
‘I’ll tell you all about it. They’re not putting a gagging order on me. They can fuck off.’
‘I should go myself,’ Sabri said. ‘Jason and the kids won’t give me any peace until I do. But using the kids’ savings. That really does feel like scraping the barrel.’
Tears were glinting in Sabri’s eyes. Without thinking, Tara reached out and put her own hand over the other woman’s, wondering whether she should offer to pay Sabri’s fee herself. One hundred and fifty pounds was nothing to her. But they hardly knew each other and all this was awkward enough.
‘This will shatter them if it’s not true,’ Sabri said.
Us too, Tara thought, as she released Sabri’s hand. We might say we don’t believe it but deep down we’re starting to hope. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Sabri what she’d do with the money, but something held her back.
‘But it might be worse if it is true,’ Sabri went on. ‘We’re regular people. We’ve no idea how to deal with that level of wealth.’
‘People manage,’ Tara said, at the same time conscious of how much easier it would be for her. Not remotely in Logan Quick’s league, she’d become accustomed, the last couple of decades, to having money. ‘People win the lottery all the time. They don’t all go into meltdown.’
‘I wonder how many others there are,’ Sabri said.
Silence for a moment. They had no way of knowing.
Tara asked, ‘Did you bring it?’
‘I’ve sewn it into my bra,’ Sabri replied. ‘Hold on.’ She turned her back and began to wriggle, her elbows out at right angles. Tara reached into her bag and pulled out her own token. She placed it on the tabletop as Sabri did the same.
‘They look the same.’ Sabri reached out. ‘May I?’
Tara nodded, although her insides clenched at the sight of someone else handling her token.
‘Yours is in my right hand.’ Sabri smiled as she raised both to the light. She twisted them so she could compare the other sides.
‘They’re not identical,’ she said. ‘Almost, but not quite. There’s a tiny number in one point of the star. Yours is five, mine is two. Look.’
She passed them back and Tara took her turn. Unlike Sabri, she needed to fish her reading glasses from her bag, but she soon saw the other woman was right. The tokens did have the tiniest of numbers. It was the only thing that differentiated them.
‘Does this mean there’s at least five of us?’ Sabri asked.
Tara put both tokens down on the table and used her forefinger to push the one with the number two a little closer to Sabri. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘The Latin means to each his deserts.’
Sabri made no move to reclaim her token and, for a second, Tara half expected her to get up and walk away, leaving it behind. ‘I know,’ she said, eventually. ‘I was a medical student for three years. Knowing some Latin was inevitable.’
‘So, the question we really should be asking ourselves,’ Tara said, ‘is why the hell does this Logan Quick think he knows what we deserve?’