Chapter 8: The Ladder

Rodney folded the Army notice into his breast pocket.

His hand was not quite steady.

"Alana," he said, quietly. "Car. Now."

"Uncle Rodney, what does it mean? What did they find?"

"Now."

He went through the glass doors without looking back at the sofas, the clients or his daughter.

Alana stood a moment longer with her phone still raised.

She looked at me, then at Hattie, and her lip trembled.

"I only wanted to go to college," she said.

Then she ran after him.

Sixty people in the lobby started talking at once.

"Mrs. Rainey," Cedric said, close to my ear. "That's the best entrance I've seen in this building in twenty years."

"I didn't enjoy it," I said.

"You looked pleased."

"I did a little," I admitted.

His mouth moved, almost a smile, and then he put it away.

The flat was above a secondhand bookshop in Bloomsbury, and it was empty except for a sofa, two beds and forty boxes of someone else's paperbacks.

Cedric had found it at four that morning, after my father rang him from New York.

"It's yours as long as you need it," he said. "The landlord owes me a favor. You won't pay rent."

"I'll pay rent," I said.

"The landlord won't let you."

"Then I'll pay you."

"I'd be a terrible friend if I took money from a woman with a bank account like yours," Cedric said, "and I'd be an even worse solicitor."

"You're being very polite about my money."

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