Heartbreaker (42 page)

In despair I say frivolously: “Maybe he’ll fall under a bus.”

“How can he when he rides around all the time in that show-off Rolls-Royce?” Elizabeth heaves a sigh. “I keep hoping someone’ll murder him,” she says, “but no one ever does. Typical, isn’t it? Nice, law-abiding people get murdered every day, but a really awkward gentleman like Asherton bounces along without a scratch.”

I can think of several ways to describe Asherton but “awkward gentleman” isn’t one of them. Elizabeth’s talent for euphemisms has reached a new high.

I want to ask her what they plan to do with Gil after the romp’s over, but I just don’t have the stomach to frame the question.

“You’d better run off and have your dinner, pet,” Elizabeth’s saying, “but I’ll see you first thing tomorrow for our Saturday fun.” And she gives me a steamy kiss to signal that I’m forgiven for the disaster of losing Mr. Moneybags.

I stagger upstairs.

Nigel serves up veal marsala and hovers around as if he’s afraid I’ll bin it, but I clean my plate and although I hesitate outside the bathroom later I move on into my room. I can’t afford to make a habit of passing out in front of clients and I certainly want to keep myself fit for Elizabeth. I’ll pick up some iron pills to take care of the anaemia—if I have it—and stop acting weird over food. It’s no big deal.

I’ve just hit the sack after taking paracetamol for the dull ache in my head when I have such a shock that I nearly levitate. I’m still agonising about Gil, and suddenly a fragment of my conversation with Elizabeth this evening reruns itself in that beat-up junk heap between my ears. It’s the bit about the Tucker videos—generated, of course, by the hidden cameras—and now I’m finally remembering that although I switched on the cameras when Colin and I entered the bedroom, I never switched them off.

I leap out of bed and stand shuddering in the dark as I think of the cameras recording Carta bringing me tea and Val doing her doctor number.

I try to work out what to do. The big question is whether Tommy’s already picked up the tapes. On any other weekday night he would have done, but Friday is when he often goes out drinking with his mates and the routine checking of the Austin Friars technology gets left until Saturday or Sunday. With any luck those videotapes will still be sitting in their machines, and all I’ll have to do is replace them with blanks. Tommy won’t query them. He knows a non-recording day does sometimes happen.

I’m recovering from the shock. The only difficulty now is that because Val insisted I took a taxi home my car’s still in the City. Inconvenient. But not a problem.

I dress and slip silently out of the house.

Another disaster. My luck’s gone walkabout. I manage to pick up a cab but when I get to the flat I find Tommy’s already collected the tapes. I know this without even having to examine the machines because we have a system to signal that everything’s ready for my next working day: he leaves a playing card face up on top of the cabinet where the blank videos are stored.

As soon as I enter the second bedroom I see the upturned ace of diamonds and spew out some bad language. Then I try to think some problem-solving thoughts.

If Tommy’s made the effort to come here on a Friday night, it probably means he’s got something special lined up for the weekend and he could well be going away. Tommy’s a football fan who treks all over the place to see his team’s beautiful male bodies bounding around. So what I now have to do is take three blank tapes from the stock in the cabinet and swap them sometime over the weekend during his absence for the three tapes he’s collected. If anything goes wrong—if, for instance, he noticed tonight that the tapes had been used but finds them blank when he comes to view them on Monday—I’ll admit to the swap but explain it by saying Colin got the better of me in a fight and I didn’t want Elizabeth to know. But the odds are Tommy wouldn’t have examined the tapes closely when he picked them up. He’d have popped them straight into a bag while daydreaming of his weekend footy-fest.

As I leave the flat I wonder whether to pick up my car, but I decide that would be risky. Elizabeth might have noticed this evening after we parted that my car wasn’t sitting on its slot. If she then sees tomorrow morning that it’s there she’ll want to know when and why I retrieved it. I can explain its absence by saying it had to be workshopped, but I can’t say it drove itself home.

The City’s a graveyard at this hour, no cabs, but on Ludgate Hill I get a night-bus to Westminster, and from there it’s not so far to walk over the river to Lambeth.

Arriving home exhausted I sleep as soon as my head thumps painfully against the pillows.

The next morning I’m up well before my early shag with Elizabeth because I need to find out Tommy’s plans for the weekend and I reckon that if he really is going away he’ll be aiming for an early departure. Jogging down the wooden steps which lead from Elizabeth’s raised ground floor to the back garden at basement level, I take a look into Tommy’s flat and see him ambling around the kitchen like a shaven-headed gorilla.

He sees me and opens his patio door. “What are you up to, Sunshine?”

“Filling in the time before I shag Elizabeth. You’re up early, aren’t you?”

“Off to Amsterdam for the weekend.”

“Football?”

“Among other things.” He leers at me. “Know what I mean?”

“I think I can just about get the gist. Enjoy yourself!” I say politely before wandering away to inspect a flowerbed.

I idle away another couple of minutes in the garden to convince him I’m just marking time and have no interest whatever in where he spends the weekend. Then I return indoors to make tea for Elizabeth.

The next stage of the retrieval operation ought to be simple but it won’t be. In an ideal world I’d wait for Tommy to leave and then slip down to his flat via the basement stairs inside the house, but the door which opens onto those basement stairs in Elizabeth’s hall is always kept locked and I don’t know where the keys are. Yet I’ve got no other way to access Tommy’s flat. Tommy has all the keys for the basement’s front door and for the patio door at the back, while the windows which face the street are not only locked but tarted up with steel shutters which get used when he’s away. Everything’s wired to the hilt, and above the front door’s a smart little burglar alarm box which is supposed to make would-be thieves burst into tears and move on.

Elizabeth approves of this external security glitz, but Locksmith Tommy’s expertise makes her all the more determined to win the internal battle of the basement stairs. After all, Elizabeth’s the house-owner and she needs to call the shots with this slimeball tenant—she doesn’t want him trotting upstairs for a snoop when she’s out. So she keeps her door to the stairs locked and bolted and she keeps the kitchen door which leads to the wooden steps and the garden locked and bolted too. Of course Tommy could pick the locks and she’d be none the wiser, but if he cuts or busts the bolts she’d know and then she’d borrow a couple of Asherton’s Big Boys to sort him out. Knowing this, Tommy leaves both doors well alone.

So my problem’s this: how do I get hold of the keys to the basement stairs? (There are two locks.) The first thing I have to do, obviously, is find out where the hell the keys are. Elizabeth keeps a spare set of her house keys and car keys on a hookboard in her kitchen, and the key to the kitchen door hangs there as well, but there’s no ring holding the keys to that vital hall door. If Elizabeth’s the only one who knows where they are I’m in trouble, but my guess is she’ll have told Nigel. It’s the kind of detail a housekeeper should know in case of an emergency.

When I return to my duplex after the shag with Elizabeth I find Nigel reading the
Sun
and eating cereal. I plonk myself down opposite him. “Where does Elizabeth keep the keys to the basement stairs?”

“In the safe,” he says, crunching away on his Frosties, and then does a double take. “Why?”

“Crisis. You know I told you last night I’d been ditched by Mr. Moneybags? Well, it was worse than I let on. There was a punch-up and he knocked me out.”

“Gav! Why didn’t you say?”

“Too proud to admit the truth even to you, mate, but listen, it gets worse: I forget about the cameras recording the whole scene, Tommy’s now got the videos and unless I retrieve them this weekend when he’s in Amsterdam I’m flapjacked. What’s the combination of the safe?”

Nigel stares at me in concern. “Dunno. That’s not the kind of information Elizabeth trusts me with.”

I stare back, even more concerned than he is. “Nige, are you saying Elizabeth’s the only one who can get at those keys?”

“No, I’m just saying I don’t know the safe combination. But Susanne does.”

My heart sinks to the soles of my feet as I realise my fate’s now in the false-nailed talons of a Barbie-doll lookalike with bowling-ball breasts. “Shit!” I’m close to panic.

“What are you going to do?” says Nigel, empathising so hard with me that he sounds as agonised as I do.

“Well, there’s no choice, is there, mate?” I say, resigning myself to the inevitable. “I’ve got to talk to Susanne.”

Over to the City I trek again to rescue my car. Then I drive to Norah’s house in Pimlico where Susanne roosts in the basement flat. On the way I remember that although Serena has a business date for this evening, we’ve agreed to meet in the afternoon, an agreement I now decide to cancel. Can’t face Serena at the moment. Can’t cope with all that pretending.

Parking down the street from Norah’s house I put through the necessary call to Serena and emerge from the car. The next bit’s tricky. I don’t want anyone from Norah’s ménage to see me as I zip down to Susanne’s flat, but I suppose that if anyone pulls up a window and yells: “Hiya!” I can always say I’m delivering something for Elizabeth.

I pad past the black railings, angle through the little gate and trot down the steps. No window gets heaved up. No one yells “Hiya!” or “Yo!” or even “Yoo-hoo!” Luck’s finally starting to run my way and not a moment too soon because I’ll need all the luck I can get once I’m face to face with Susanne.

I press the doorbell.

I’m still not sure what to say, and my indecision’s because I’ve never found the knack of lying successfully to her. She sees straight through me with those feral black eyes of hers. Unlike Norah’s current crop of well-educated girls, Susanne’s worked the streets. Nothing I say or do could ever shock her, because as far as prostitution’s concerned she’s been there, done that and got the T-shirt—or in other words, she’s been beaten up, banged up and buggered up and she’s had the nervous breakdown to prove it. But she’s survived, and now she has this flat all to herself and a regular pay cheque which has nothing to do with renting out her private parts. She’s escaped from the system, but I’m still trapped in it, and suddenly I know why I can’t stand the sight of her. It’s because she’s got a life and I haven’t. She’s got the freedom to be herself, while I—

The door opens. She’s there, staring at me in astonishment. Her long black hair, which she usually wears scrunched up and tartily draped, is loose, curtaining her pointy face and making her look like a wannabe witch. She hasn’t coated herself with make-up yet so she looks pale and spotty. Odd to see her without false eyelashes, but otherwise her eyes are all too familiar: pitch-black, sullen, hostile.

“Shit, look at this!” she says, passing up the five-star welcome. “What the hell do
you
want?”

“I’m in a mess and I need your help. Can I come in, please?”

She’s more astonished than ever but she’s impressed by the “please.” This really must be serious, she’s thinking. He’s being well-behaved enough to stifle himself and he’s spoken two sentences without calling me some slaggish nickname.

Opening the door wider she says severely: “Don’t step on the cat and don’t be snotty about the décor.”

I follow her through the hall to the eat-in kitchen at the back of the house. The basement flat’s at ground level here, just like Tommy’s, and the windows look out on Norah’s garden where a tiny lawn is framed by shrubs. A tree screens the garden from the house behind on the parallel street, and a white wrought-iron spiral staircase, much more arty than the wooden steps at Elizabeth’s house, curls from the patio to the balcony outside Norah’s kitchen above us.

In Susanne’s kitchen I see herby-looking things in pots, dirty dishes in the sink and Alexis the cat sitting unhygienically on the table. I offer my index finger to see if the mog’s mean enough to try a bite, but my flesh only rates a disdainful sniff.

“You watch it,” says Susanne to the cat. “You don’t know where he’s been.” To me she adds: “Suppose you want coffee.”

I spot some over-boiled dregs in a glass jug. “No, thanks. Just your help.”

“I don’t like you being so nice,” she says, slitty-eyed with suspicion. “What’s the story?”

Psyching myself up I sit down with her at the kitchen table. The cat gets removed to Susanne’s lap where it purrs and tries to head-butt her breasts. It’s a wonder it doesn’t knock itself out.

“So?” says Susanne impatiently.

“Had a disaster last night. Colin arrives and goes mental. The jealous perv suspected me of hetero-bonking and hired some PIs who uncovered my dates with Serena.”

“And?”

“I made a balls-up of the self-defence and got knocked out. Didn’t tell Elizabeth—it was bad enough having to tell her that Colin had ditched me. Then late last night my beaten-up brain remembers the whole scene’s on tape.” I pause for air.

“And?” says Susanne again without expression.

“I shoot off to Austin Friars but Tommy’s already retrieved the tapes. He’s now gone to Amsterdam for the weekend and I’ve got to get into his flat to substitute blanks—but of course I need the hall door keys from the safe, and I was hoping we could do a deal about the combination.”

Susanne sighs before crooning to the cat: “What do you think, loveliness? What do you think of that funny little story Mr. Blake’s been spinning us? Isn’t it just the cutest little story you ever heard?” Then she dumps the cat on the floor, leans forward with her elbows on the table and snarls: “Wise up, Junk-Hunk! Tell me the truth or get lost! What’s on that tape which makes you shit bricks at the thought of Elizabeth seeing it?”