I walked over to the hire car and found a parking ticket had been scrappily attached to the windscreen. I got in, drove. The drop-off place was only down the road, past the huge brick church, past the pub outside which Ruth Ellis shot her lover, left turn and there it was on the right. I pulled up on the hardstanding outside the large glass window and for a few moments I tried to go over things in my head.
Lauren had always known there’d been no alternative other than for her to play second fiddle to Martinique. Getting rid of Freia was an act of jealousy and one which she’d already practically admitted to me in the Stag and Rifle that time. But it hadn’t been Lauren’s jealousy, Patrick’s pride had no doubt been pricked by the chinless wonder Freia had taken up with.
Having Laurie killed was the line which Lauren had refused to cross, and that’s the moment I’d been steered onto the scene by my prophetic dream. When I’d shown curiosity about Freia, Lauren had recognized that I was following the scent. Suspecting that Patrick’s murder of Freia would be revealed, she’d laid a trail, part truth, part fiction – not to convince me otherwise, but in an attempt to use me to betray Patrick; to do what had become inevitable, and to save her from having to do it. But I’d failed to be her rat, her squealer, and in the end, she’d been forced to inform on the two of them. She’d used her underworld network well; after all, the gilded ones are all connected, in one way or another.
When I reported to the car hire office they charged me extra for late return, plus another sum of money for the parking ticket. As I handed them the key I looked at my own key ring. There was an unfamiliar key on it and it took me a second or two to realize that the key I’d left on Lauren’s desk wasn’t the key to the office front door; it was the key to my flat. I couldn’t go back now. When I arrived at W4 I would simply have to climb up the gas pipe and enter my flat through the open kitchen window. It would be a doddle after my ordeal at Brazzers.
I wrote a cheque and left. They’d already got the car doors open and were servicing it for the next customer. Its radio was blaring, and a comfortingly adenoidal female voice was assuring me – in song, that if I fell, she would catch me, time after time. But it wasn’t me who’d fallen, I hadn’t climbed.
My dream and the glimpses of déjà vu had been correct after all. Yet in the gospel according to Lauren it had all been chance and coincidence. No, I couldn’t believe that. It was my dream, meant for me alone and there had been a pattern. But instead of getting on with the job I’d allowed myself to be ensorcelled by it, become enslaved by the high masters, and now having had their sport they had discarded me.
I’d failed… Failed to take the opportunity to better myself – like the day I had climbed the wall at the end of my parents’ street and looked over – ‘…just houses, they’re just houses,’ I’d said as if I hadn’t wanted anything to do with them.
In my slow-witted way, I’d failed to read the rules of Patrick’s game. I’d been given a chance and I’d flunked it. Patrick’s offer had been for another person – another man, or woman – no, it was always going to be a man, but someone different, someone better.
‘I gave Pulse the opportunity of his life, and what did he do? He flunked it. I asked him the question; “Pulse, what have all these successful designers got that you haven’t? Nothing, you’re as good as any of them but you have to fight for what you want. You have to fight” – and he didn’t.’ It was true, I had convinced myself that ‘taking part’ was more important than fighting.
‘I was sure Pulse was going to bring something different to the office, something of substance, something deeper, but he didn’t.’ It was true, I had ignored substance for the sake of something that was as ephemeral as will-o-the-wisp.
I’d been wrong about Bailey and the Beatles as well; out with the old, in with the new – ‘the old road is rapidly ageing’; the rise of the youthful underdog with fresh ideas, merit succeeding over class? It was a view which was oversimplistic, a cliché – even sentimental, and an unworthy interpretation of the complexities of British society.
I’d misread Lauren, underestimated her. She’d been right, and she’d been one step ahead of me all the time. Martinique would leave Patrick; he had been wasting her time. I’d naively thought there’d been a future for Lauren and me, I had been shallow. Worst of all I’d been blind to the presence of Lauren’s unconditional love for Patrick.
As I crossed the road another thought occurred to me. Everything in my head was merely my version of events. The biggest mistake I’d made was to assume that out there somewhere lay the truth. Not so. What worried me most was the thought that Lauren might have known everything, and that the two of them – from the moment I recognized Freia’s photograph – had toyed with me and tried to draw me in to form a devious and lethal triad. They had played at being their own high masters. Fear of being caught would have been all part of the thrill. I knew that feeling only too well myself now.
The Bull, of course! One of Zeus’s many disguises. Another guise; the torrent of gold descending and impregnating Danae as she lay in her brass-lined prison. That was myth, it wasn’t truth, but somehow the casual application of the legend’s peculiar romantic logic made me feel better.
Oh, I would wait all right. I would read the newspapers, but truth in fiction is so neat… Carefully and cosily organized within the perfect sphere of its own narrative, with its formulaic patterns, and that little twist at the end. In the great cosmos outside that sphere lies an undefined constellation of half-truths. I had taken this job with the intention of getting nearer to the truth, but I now knew and for certain that there is no fixed truth. Any legal case is as good as its solicitor, their research team, and the barrister who presents it. Lauren and Patrick would have the best. In the universe, there are the gods, and the rest.
As I left the traffic roaring up the hill behind me and walked into the tube station I thought of Mum. I would not tell her the truth, or even my miserable version of it. It would be the first time I had lied to her.
F I N I S
The Gilded Ones Page 21