Scar Tissue (14 page)

I started to howl again. Through my tears, I managed to croak to Moffatt, ‘You’re right: they’re much kinder parents than my first ones.’

Whether it was my damned waterworks or the firm hand Moffatt placed under his elbow, Taz seemed to lose interest in renewing his moonlight emotion. We all said polite farewells, and I was given my key. I was just heading for the lift when Moffatt called me.

‘Just remember, young lady, you don’t open your door for anyone. Is that clear? Anyone.’

The hotel produced, at my embarrassed request, complimentary toothpaste and toothbrush on top of what appeared to be their usual range of toiletries and goodies like a shower cap. But it seemed terribly sad that the price of my stay in all this luxury was the sacrifice of that lovely mobile home. Or was the sacrifice of the mobile home really to protect Fullers itself, and this simply a by-product? Whichever it was, it was all my fault.

I twanged an imaginary rubber band on my wrist. No, of course it wasn’t all my fault. Some of it was. My first career had set it all off, no denying that. But it hadn’t been my fault that my pimp, Oscar, in many ways a decent man and certainly one who loathed violence, had passed me on to Granville to pay off some debt he’d foolishly incurred. Oscar was so mild-mannered he wouldn’t have dreamed of selling me, if he’d known about Granville. Or would he? I suppose it depends on the size of the debt and the other measures Granville was threatening to use if it wasn’t settled. Not just threats, of course. Granville had ways of fulfilling them. If I thought about those, however, it would be very hard to keep cheerful.

OK, it might have been my fault in the first place – though there had been extreme circumstances that drove me into prostitution – but recently I’d been pretty blameless. All I’d done was to pass on information to a bent cop about a crime possibly committed by a very unpleasant man. And the cop and a thoroughly evil man had conspired to kill me.
If anyone was the victim here, I suppose it was me. No. Caffy didn’t do victim, remember!

I lay back: it was time to let the bath foam do its work and relax me. I could forget all about the criminals and their crimes, just as they’d taught me. Start with the feet, then the ankles, then … off I was going…

Except one thing niggled me. In my ruminations I’d used the word information. It had seemed the right word at the time, but there was something about it… In fact it was still buzzing round by the time I’d finished my bath, cleaned my teeth and stowed the contact lenses in the little bowls I’d kept with me in case they’d become uncomfortable during the day. The optician had dinned into me that I mustn’t ever wear them without cleaning them properly, so I’d have to get some more fluid. I’d have to get a lot of things: I’d be able to retrieve most of my possessions from Fullers when I could eventually get back in, but until then I hadn’t even a pair of clean pants to my name. Swathing myself in the bathrobe made of thicker towelling than the laundrette tumble dryer would have coped with in a morning, I started on a list.

Pristine pad. Pristine pencil. It was like being a child again. Such little things giving such huge pleasure. What surprised me, as I picked up the pencil intending to write

Knickers

Contact lens solution

T-shirt

Trainers

Socks

Bra

I wrote the word,

INFORMATION???

and just to make sure drew a big, swooping oval round it. Only then did I write the list.

What next?

Should I raid the mini-bar? On the whole I thought I’d had enough alcohol. And I was much too hot. That bathrobe would be fine when it wasn’t still about twenty degrees Celsius outside. Then damn me if I didn’t spot that what I thought was just a heater doubled as an air-conditioning unit. Trouble was, it sounded like an aircraft taking off.

I might as well go to bed and try to sleep. And then I realised one huge, gaping gulf in all the arrangements. There was no paperback to fall asleep over. It seemed a bit disrespectful to take a Gideon Bible to bed. But disrespect or not, in it had to come. There’d been one or two Bible-bashers in Rehab. I’d always found them tediously lacking in humour. But tonight I must confess I found the story of the woman taken in adultery spot on. I must have done. It was still open at the page when my alarm-call came through the next morning.

It promised to be another scorcher. I was just about to have a shower when I noticed that there was a swimming pool available. I was halfway down the corridor before I realised I didn’t have any swimmies. But I’d dimly registered you could buy all sorts of trashy jewellery in the hotel lobby; maybe they sold swim things at the pool? I could charge it to my room! No, I couldn’t ask the tax-payer to subsidise me to that extent. Could I? It wasn’t as if I was a very good swimmer. And then that therapy bit about the inner child popped up in my brain.

Those lengths I swam in my new suit – people with personalised abdomens like mine don’t go in for bikinis – might not have been very elegant lengths, but at least there were a dozen of them.

Yes!

A luxurious shower sluiced off the chlorine. I found a hairdryer, which blew my witch’s locks into some semblance of order. And then I strode off for breakfast. Given the amount of food I’d put away the previous evening, I surprised myself by tackling it so enthusiastically. Well, juice, as much fruit as I could afford in a week, the full mixed grill (except someone ought to tell the chef to source his bacon from local free-range pigs), and then toast and conserves. Tea or coffee ad lib. Well, not too much coffee, not remembering Crabton’s loo provision.

I have to confess I shoved into my bag all the half-bottles of shampoo and bath oil on the grounds that they’d only be thrown away anyway if I didn’t take them. The list and that note too. Looking round the room – I’d nothing to leave, so it must have been simply to fix it in my mind – I flapped a hand in farewell. Much as I liked my eyrie, I had to admit that this had a few more home comforts. Home comforts? A bit of a misnomer there, Caffy.

Bugger it: Lucy.

‘And you will be in for dinner this evening, Madam?’ the immaculate young Frenchman at Reception asked. At least, he was pretending to be a Frenchman, but his accent creaked and I didn’t believe him. It was certainly nothing like the genuine French accent purveyed by one of my clients – and I knew he was genuine because he was in senior management
in Renault and used to pop across to see how his cars were selling in the outlet in Brum. He’d offered me a Clio once, lots of Va-va-voom: I didn’t accept because I knew who’d get his filthy mitts on it, and to my mind Granville had enough wheels anyway.

I shook my head. ‘I’m just checking out.’ I slapped the key card on the desk as evidence.

‘But is there something wrong? We have a reservation for you for five nights. Last night, that was what was booked.’ No, definitely not French. Somewhere much further east, surely.

‘In that case,’ I said, with what I hoped was aplomb, though I’d never been entirely sure what that was, ‘I’ll be in for dinner.’

Which meant a couple of additions to that list. It was going to be hard enough eating on my own in a place like this – how on earth did Cinderella feel going into that ballroom alone? – I wasn’t going to make it any worse by turning up in the jeans and top that, for want of anything else, I’d had to wear for work. If it had been the Daweses’ money paying for everything, I might have had second thoughts about all this spending. As it was – and though somewhere deep down I realised that everyone who took out a policy would be paying for my treat – Todd’s insurance company seemed so distant and anonymous I should really enjoy spending it.

The question was, as I realised when Paula strode into the foyer, when.

‘I suppose you could take Trev into Folkestone at lunchtime,’ she said, getting into the passenger seat. ‘It took
me five whole minutes to start the bugger this morning,’ she explained. ‘He must be missing you.’

‘Needing a service, more like.’

Paula didn’t like helpful suggestions. ‘I suppose Canterbury’s got a better range of shops, but at least you can park in Folkestone if you don’t mind paying through the nose, and there’s a Debenhams right in the middle. Plus a Marks and Sparks for undies and things. Your mate Moffatt called me this morning. He said to make sure you bought enough to last several days. The police would fork out for what Todd’s insurance wouldn’t.’ She was quiet for a bit, then said, ‘We’ve got ourselves into something big here, Caffy. Do you think we can cope with it?’

‘It’s either that or go under.’ It wasn’t quite the answer to her question but it was the best I could manage. I tried again. ‘Maybe Moffatt’ll come up with an undercover cop to look after us.’

‘He didn’t say anything?’

‘I think he’s worried about the money involved – remember all that stuff on Meg’s radio about police budgets?’ I refused to think about that swimsuit. ‘Unless he didn’t think he could find someone who could paint.’

‘Not Taz again?’ She dropped her voice a little as if she were speaking to an invalid.

I breezed back, ‘Well, he’s really with the Met. And he’s very junior – he wasn’t really here in any official capacity.’

‘He seems to have known who to speak to, though. I didn’t know quite what to make of him,’ she continued. ‘I mean, he’s a real dream to look at – he ought to be on TV, in one of those costume dramas. Imagine him in knee-breeches.
Heathcliff! Caffy!’ she called out, clasping her hands on her chest, as if the joke were new. Believe me it wasn’t. Then she looked at me. ‘Do you know what I think? I think he’s like one of those gorgeous chocs you get given at Christmas, no other time, not just inside a lovely box but specially wrapped, too. Lindt, I think.’

I didn’t comment.

‘Imagine a choc like that, only when you bite into it it’s hollow.’

I nodded. I got the gist, at least. ‘But he’s not, not really,’ I protested. ‘He got me out of ten kinds of mess – before.’

‘You know something,’ she said. ‘I reckon you may have been in ten kinds of mess but the person who got you out wasn’t him, but you.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without him,’ I insisted.

‘Or what you thought was him.’ Paula always liked to have the last word, so I thought it was best to let her.

There was a beat-up old utility truck parked outside the manor gates. The driver waved Paula over as she got out to open them. After a few moments’ conversation, she pointed. He followed me in and parked alongside me.

Paula’s smile was as dry as they come. ‘This is Sid,’ she said. ‘Come for a day’s trial, he says.’

We shook hands solemnly.

Whereas Taz looked a likely subject for a painter, Sid looked ready to slap the old pigment anywhere it was needed. He was built, to use the elegant Midlands expression of my childhood that fear of offending Paula had once made me stifle, like a brick shithouse, giving the impression he
could carry not just a hod of bricks but Paula and me to balance the other shoulder, so to speak. ‘You give the orders, Guv,’ he told Paula, ‘so far as this job’s concerned.’

To my ears, everyone south of Watford talks like Eliza Dolittle before the Professor got at her, but this was the thickest Southern accent I’d ever heard.

Paula took him over to meet the others, simply introducing him as Sid.

‘Morning, girls – a nuvver nice day. Jus’ wo’ ve doctor ordered. Wo’ we go’ to do today, ven?’

Girls. We always referred to ourselves and each other as women. And no professional painter would welcome broiling heat like this. Our smiles were polite, no more.

Paula sent him to rub down the window Taz had botched. She turned to us all: ‘Well?’

‘It’s the way he talks that does my head in,’ I said.

‘Glottal stops,’ Meg said.

‘What’s a glottal?’ Helen asked.

‘A glottal stop is where instead of moving your tongue forward to say “t” or whatever, you just stop it. “Wha’ever”, not “whatever”: get it?’

‘So what’s a glottal?’ she repeated.

‘Maybe it’s something to do with an epiglottis,’ Meg pondered, and off they went, still talking.

Van der Poele was in the house all morning, so there was no opportunity for heroics, with or without glottals. Sid rubbed down and dusted off and even applied a turpsy rag to his window frame before applying primer. His movements were surprisingly delicate, quite finicky, for such a big man, his
great bananas of fingers curling round the brush-head almost protectively.

God, it was so hot. We’d all been known to paint in shorts and bikini tops, but for various reasons none of us seemed inclined to strip today. Either we felt it would be wrong with a male in our midst, or we couldn’t face the thought of Sid’s naked beerbelly flopping round overhead. At lunchtime, the van was like a sauna, despite being parked in the shade with the windows and doors wide open. It started first time and I got into reverse.

‘’Ere, young lady! Wha’ d’you fink you’re up to, ven?’

‘Going into Folkestone for a spot of shopping, Sid. Want a lift?’

In answer he zipped round to the passenger door and popped inside. ‘At least I should be able to use this,’ he said, flourishing his mobile.

‘Not until about a mile down the road. Pain, isn’t it?’ We set off.

‘You know what it means, though: it means His Nibs in there has to use a landline – should be able to get a tap on that.’ In private, his accent, though pretty strong, was at least no longer impenetrable.

‘Emails?’

He tapped his nose, settling back to enjoy a really scenic ride in what seemed like contented silence.

As we picked up the motorway, he dabbed away with those enormous digits, and was soon muttering into the handset. As the one most intimately involved, I’d have liked a decent chance to eavesdrop, but he hunched away from me, and the van’s engine noise – it really did need a service, by the
sound of it – and the nasty concrete road surface combined to drown him out.

The traffic in Folkestone was holiday-season bad, and parking, when I got to the town centre car park I wanted, was dodgy. I might have squeezed into some of those tiny spaces in a Fiesta, but I was after something a tad more spacious. At last a little old lady pulled her Nissan Micra out of a slot big enough for a Sherman tank and I dived in, much to the chagrin of a family in a people carrier. Tough. I’d only twenty minutes to shop and they had all day to drift round.

‘See you back here at ten past?’ I asked Sid.

‘See me every time you turn round, more like,’ he said. ‘I’m sticking with you, kid.’