‘Mister Sugar?’ My sneer is long and suggestive. ‘Is that what you call him when you’re snuggled up together in Mummy Cherry’s bed?’
Her face remains expressionless; Ronnie doesn’t take my bait. ‘You have no business being in Mister Sugar’s private room—’
‘So how is it that you are allowed in there?’
‘Because,’ she says slowly, as if to a child, ‘that’s what housekeepers do, they look after a house. Dust, mop, clean.’
I see it now, the sadness dulling her deep-brown eyes, the grief that clings to and lines the corners of her mouth. How her face is clawed with sorrow.
I step back from the disturbing intensity of her expression, giving her an answer to her question, even though she doesn’t have the damned right to one. ‘I saw the door open and thought Dad was in there.’
Her lips ripple. She looks like a child about to cry. ‘But you must’ve seen he wasn’t there while you stood in the doorway. So why did you go in?’
My mouth twists. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you—’
‘But you have to explain yourself to Mister Sugar.’
Stubbornly, I fold my arms. ‘Tell Sugar and I’ll let him know the door was open.’ The dawning horror on her face tells me she knows where I’m going with this. I twist, just enough to make sure she understands. ‘Then he’s going to ask himself, why it wasn’t shut. And didn’t my housekeeper see it open? Now, if she didn’t see it open that means she can’t have been doing her job very well—’
‘Stop.’ I shut up. Ronnie lets out a long breath. ‘You don’t tell Mister Sugar the door was open, and I won’t tell him you took your busy-body-self into his private domain.’
Smart-mouthed too! I let her demeaning words float over my head. ‘Deal.’ Ronnie visibly relaxes at that.
As she turns to go I ask, ‘Who are the women in the photo on the whiteboard? What is all that stuff in there?’
Ronnie rounds back on me, brow stiffly arched. ‘I couldn’t possibly say because my understanding is you’ve never seen anything in Mister Sugar’s room.’
And with that clever putdown, she leaves me alone in the hallway. What is Sugar doing in that room? Who are these women in the photos? Are they the missing people he was talking to John Dixon about at the funeral? More of the intense discussion Sugar had with John Dixon comes back to me:
‘People go missing all the time Sugar. You know that.’
‘Not one after the other. Not like this.’
Is this the investigation Sugar wants to reopen from nearly thirty years ago?
And did I really see what I thought I had on the desk in the photo?
The Good Knight? But the Good Knight unbroken with his lady on his horse?
The Good Knight is my keepsake, my little piece of treasure. It has always been with me.
As soon as I get to the car I take the Good Knight out of my bag. Run my finger along its broken edge that has smoothed over the years. Then I cup it lovingly between my hands.
It is so precious to me because it was the only thing my birth mother left with me before she handed baby-me over to social services.
CHAPTER 8
No Name
If someone had told me what was going to go down I’d have called them out as a liar. Y’know, talk to the hand because the face ain’t listening. Badness waiting for me up ahead? You must be joking. The only things bobbing on the horizon of my life are big ’n’ bold with me large ’n’ in charge. Great things. God above knows, I’d grafted my knuckles to the bone to get where I am.
So, I’m in my bedroom, half-grooving and a-moving to Queen Latifah’s ‘U.N.I.T.Y’ and styling out my braids when I hear it drop through the letter box. The letter had arrived. Don’t ask me how I knew what it was, I just did. My heart started beating so bad I thought I was about ready to pass out. See, the thing is, what’s inside that letter is a biggie. I’m a twenty-three-year-old black woman from what idiots with their high-falutin’， tootin’， snootin’ ways call the wrong end of town. There isn’t jack wrong with where I live. An injection of cash, a lick of paint and a solid dose of proper education and it will be good-to-go, you get me?
That’s why I applied to go to university. The letter that’s just dropped is a yes or no answer from them. I didn’t listen to the careers teacher at school who had the brass nerve to stare directly into the promise brimming in my eyes and tell me that places like university aren’t meant for girls like me. I’ve been hearing people telling me about girls like me since forever.