by Ann Granger
‘Not at the club,’ I said. ‘I’m just running an errand for Lisa.’
‘I didn’t think you’d work at the club,’ she said dismissively.
Very rude, I thought. All right, I’m not the glamorous type, but there’s such a thing as tact.
She went to one of the sofas and sat down, crossing her legs and swinging her foot. She wore strappy sandals with very high heels and her toenails were painted to match her fingernails. The action indicated not so much nervousness as a pent-up frustration ready to burst out and wreak havoc. ‘Sit down, Donald,’ she ordered.
He shambled across and sat down beside her, hitching up his cream chinos to reveal white silk socks and flat white loafers. I wondered whether the look he was aiming for was nautical. I closed the flat door and took a seat on the opposite sofa facing the pair of them. We must have looked like three passengers in a train.
‘I’ve got an arrangement with Mrs Kovacs downstairs,’ Julie confided. She began to rummage in a capacious white leather bag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You smoke?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘I’d give up,’ she said, ‘if it wasn’t for the stress. I’ve had a lot of stress. Divorce isn’t easy and Mickey is being a real shit.’
Donald moved to pull a lighter from his blazer pocket and thumb it into flame. Julie leaned towards him and lit her cigarette. He put the lighter away without attempting to light up himself. Julie looked round her.
‘Got an ashtray in here?’
‘I’ll look in the kitchen,’ I said. It was strange, playing hostess to these two in this flat. I couldn’t see an ashtray in the kitchen but I found a saucer and brought that back, putting it on the glass coffee table.
‘Ta,’ she said and tapped out the already long column of ash.
‘Mrs Kovacs,’ I said, ‘would be the old lady who lives in the flat below this one.’
‘That’s right. She keeps an eye open for me. See, I know Mickey’s trying to diddle me over the divorce settlement. Well, I’m not having it!’ She nodded and blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.
I coughed meaningfully and waved it away.
‘Sorry, dear,’ she said attempting to dispel the fumes with a wave of her scarlet nails. ‘Well, old Ma Kovacs, she lets me know what goes on up here!’ Julie nodded. ‘Of course, I know anyway. I’m not daft. You know what? I’ve got it worked out and you can tell Mickey so if you see him. Or you can tell that Lisa so. She’s not having my flat. She’s not having anything of mine. Well,’ Julie reflected, scowling into the spiralling cigarette smoke, ‘she can have my husband and welcome to him, but she’s not having anything else.’
‘Mrs Kovacs,’ I said, sticking to my own line of conversation, ‘phoned you to let you know a stranger had turned up with the key of the flat and was up here.’
‘That’s it, dear. So Donald and I jumped in the car and came over from Hampstead. Didn’t we, Donald?’
Donald nodded silently.
Perhaps Julie noticed that I eyed Donald with a slightly puzzled look. At any rate, she felt she had to explain him. ‘Mickey himself might have turned up and I didn’t want to face him all on my own. I wanted, you know, moral support.’ She nodded at Donald.
Donald looked more like strong-arm support to me, but, either way, Julie had probably been prudent. The idea that Mickey might just walk in on the three of us was an unsettling one. But there was safety in numbers, if he did.
‘So,’ said Julie. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘This business of your divorce and whose flat this is and all the rest of it, it’s nothing to do with me, right? I didn’t even know Mickey Allerton was married.’
‘Well, he soon won’t be,’ said Julie crisply. ‘Where’s the bimbo?’
‘If you mean Lisa,’ I said, ‘she’s had to go and visit her family. Her father suffers very bad health and he’s in a wheelchair.’ Julie stared at me. ‘On the level,’ I said. ‘She asked me to pop in and check out the flat because she left in a hurry and she doesn’t know when she’ll be coming back.’
Julie stubbed out her cigarette and leaned towards me. ‘You can tell her from me that she’s not never coming back here, right? I’m getting in a locksmith tomorrow to change all the locks. My lawyer says I can.’
‘Like it’s nothing to do with me,’ I persisted.
Julie leaned back, arms folded, and surveyed me. ‘But you know my husband?’
‘We’ve met,’ I said.
‘She’s got him twisted round her little finger,’ Julie said.
Not to the point where he took it quietly when Lisa decided to end the affair. It was no use telling Julie that Lisa had had enough. She wouldn’t believe it and I couldn’t blame her, not with all that expensive schmutter in the dressing room. My mind was now running in a new direction. Mickey had invested heavily in this little love nest. He was trying to persuade the flown lovebird back into it. But if she really wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t come back, it might not end with only Ivo floating in the river. I’d read about crimes of passion. I had to get out of this whole thing.
‘You know the trouble with my husband?’ asked Julie conversationally as she lit another cigarette. A haze of blue smoke was beginning to fill the air between us and my eyelids itched. ‘You know why he’s got himself into this mess with that girl?’
‘He didn’t realise age difference mattered?’ I ventured since she seemed to expect an answer.
‘He’s not that old!’ she snapped. I realised she and Allerton were probably much of a generation and my implication that Mickey was verging on the elderly hadn’t gone down well. Studying her now I could see how the skin round her eyes was beginning to sag and her jaw was losing its firm line. She hadn’t yet resorted to plastic surgery but the day would come if she wanted to stay looking the way she did now. Even so, I thought with some sympathy, it wouldn’t do her any good. Mickey had already found a way to recapture his lost youth. Lisa had the key to this flat and the visitor didn’t.
‘Well, no,’ I said hastily. ‘And he’s looked after himself. He’s a very attractive man.’ I added, ‘Not my type! But I can see he would be for a lot of women. Still, it’s got to be twenty years between them.’
‘Age doesn’t matter,’ said Julie firmly. ‘Does it, Donald?’
Donald appeared surprised at this unexpected appeal to him for an opinion on matters of the heart. His bushy eyebrows shot up and he uttered a kind of grunt which could be interpreted any way you wanted.
‘Mickey’s problem,’ said Julie, ‘has always been that he’s a bit of a dreamer.’
Now I must have looked surprised because a dreamer wasn’t how I’d have described Allerton. A well-groomed thug who exacted value for every pound spent and didn’t like being crossed, yes. Wandering lonely as a cloud, no.
‘You can believe it.’ She gestured at me with the cigarette. ‘Now I give Mickey his due. He’s done well for himself. For a long time I could have said he’d done well for both of us because we were together then.’ Julie leaned forward and through gritted teeth uttered, ‘Twenty-four years. Next year I was looking forward to our silver wedding. I was planning a big bash. I won’t say Mickey had never let his fancy stray. But it was nothing that mattered, not until little Miss Plum-in-her-mouth turned up. What was a girl like that doing, asking for a job at the Silver Circle?’
‘She wanted to be a dancer,’ I said.
‘Then she’s as daft as he is,’ said Julie, sucking furiously on the weed. ‘You know what Mickey’s dad did for a living?’
‘No idea,’ I said faintly.
‘He worked for the council, environmental health they call it now. Rat-catcher in chief, that’s what he was. It was a respectable living, mind, and we’d all be worse off without rat-catchers, but Mickey, he wanted to be in charge of his own life. He didn’t want anyone telling him what to do and he wanted glamour. You don’t find any glamour down drains.’
I nodded agreement.
It had occurred to me I should encourage her to unburden herself. Anything she told me about Mickey might prove useful. Know your enemy! ‘Go on,’ I invited.
She was more than willing. ‘When I met Mickey he was running a pub and all his family was real proud of him. Then he scraped enough together to stop working for the brewery and go independent. His mum told everyone her son was a successful businessman. So he was. But Mickey, he had dreams far, far beyond pulling pints. He turned the pub into a club. It was just a starting point. He sold up and moved on to something bigger and in a better location. Then he took on a second place. It was like everything he touched turned to, you know, gold. Like that bloke in the story.’
‘King Midas,’ I said. ‘It ends badly, that story.’
‘So does this one. No matter how well things were going, Mickey wanted to do better. The thing that triggered all the trouble, as I see it, was when he bought the villa.’
My mind was running ahead of her now. ‘In Spain?’ I guessed.
She nodded. ‘It’s a lovely place, Fran. It’s got a kidney-shaped swimming pool.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘You bet it is!’ she retorted. ‘But we started mixing with a different set of people and Mickey, he started to get really big ideas. He wants to open up this really posh nightclub in Spain, the sort of place where you get stars to come and sing for the punters. All upmarket décor and no week-in-the-sun holidaymakers but the real high rollers. “Mick,” I said to him. “Stick to what you know.” He wouldn’t listen to me. But it was good advice, wasn’t it, Donald?’
Donald grunted again. I wondered if he could speak.
‘Then along comes Miss Lisa, all nicely spoken and easy on the eye, a bit of real quality totty. And Mickey loses any common sense he ever had just like that, overnight. I’m out: she’s in. We’d bought this flat as an investment because there’s good money to be made renting out furnished accommodation around here. But then Mickey pinched the keys and moved Miss Lisa in. I might, just might, have put up with that if I’d thought it was temporary. Mickey’s at a funny age for a man. They do silly things. I don’t mean you, Donald.’ She patted his knee.
Donald looked alarmed at this intimacy and then puzzled as if he wasn’t sure he was being paid a compliment or insulted.
Julie took up her tale. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no, Mickey thinks he’s going to sell up here and move out to Spain, taking her with him. They’ll live in the villa and open up this big fancy club and run it together.’ Julie bared her teeth in what was intended for a smile. ‘Over my dead body,’ she said.
Now I didn’t like to point out to her that it might come to just that. She knew Mickey better than I did. But he’d been married to the woman for twenty-four years and he’d probably realised it wouldn’t be easy walking out. She wouldn’t settle without a fight. It was ironic, really. He couldn’t get rid of Julie and he couldn’t keep Lisa. I found it sad. Julie wasn’t sad or, if she had been, she’d got over it. Now she was out for everything she could salvage from the wreck of her marriage. That was all that mattered to her.
‘Oh, I’m a realist,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t stop him doing it. He’ll come to grief but that’s his problem. Mine is getting what’s owing to me for twenty-four years’ loyalty. That’s why I’m getting a divorce. I’m getting a court to tell him what’s due to me. He can argue with me but he can’t argue with a court, right?’
‘Right,’ I said faintly. ‘I see your point. After so long together . . .’
She surged on. ‘Do you know? We lived above that pub when we were first married. We were childhood sweet-hearts, you know that?’ She fired the question at me.
I shook my head.
‘No, of course you don’t,’ said Julie suddenly sounding lachrymose. ‘But we were. I was eighteen when we got married and he was twenty-two. Only a couple of kids really but we were as happy as larks. The only furniture we had was bits and pieces our families gave us or we got from second-hand shops. But from the start Mickey was full of ideas how he would make it big-time and we would both be living in luxury. He did it, too. And we were still happy even though we didn’t have any children. Funny, you always think you’ll have your own kids. But it didn’t happen for Mickey and me. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me. I would’ve liked a baby, but Mickey said, it didn’t matter, we had each other.’
Merry hell. I’d be in tears if she kept on like this.
Luckily Julie reverted to her aggressive mode. ‘Now not only he doesn’t want me, he wants to cheat me out of this flat and anything else he can stop me getting. He says I can have the house in Hampstead. Big deal. He knows I’m living there and he’d have a devil of a job getting me out of it. But trust Mickey, he found a way to turn even that to his advantage. “You’re getting that big house,” he says, “and it’s worth a good bit, so I don’t have to give you any more. Fair’s fair,” he had the nerve to say. “You get the house, I get the rest.” ’
She spluttered to a halt, took a deep breath and began again. ‘Fair? The bastard doesn’t know the meaning of the word! I gave him the best years of my life. I could tell him, he’s not the only one who isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair! Men, they mature like a good wine, eh? A woman . . .’ She broke off again and cast a slightly nervous glance at Donald. But he sat there looking so blank it was difficult to tell if he was even listening. He’d probably heard it all before, anyway.
She turned practical. ‘I realise I won’t get the villa in Spain and there’s not much I can do about that. But I’m having this flat as part of my divorce settlement. After all, if Mickey sells both clubs he’ll be pretty well set up and I don’t suppose I’ll see any of the money because he’ll spirit it abroad. Mickey’s good at doing that. So I should have the two residential properties in this country. That’s only fair, isn’t it?’ she appealed to me. ‘My lawyer says it is. I worked for years in the pub behind the bar for nothing and I worked as receptionist in the first club for a couple of years until Mickey reckoned now we’d moved house to a swankier area, it wouldn’t do for me to work in a club. I had to be, you know, a proper lady and stay home going to coffee mornings and making friends with the sort of people Mickey wanted us to be thick with. I worked hard at that, too. I chatted up the wives and then Mickey got to meet the husbands. Everything I’ve done in my whole life,’ she concluded passionately, ‘I’ve done for Mickey Allerton! Stupid, that’s what I was. Well, I’ve stopped being stupid now! You can tell him that from me.’
I thought about all those unhappy letters to the agony aunt I’d read in Beryl’s woman’s magazine. When the worm turns, it does so with a vengeance.
‘Julie,’ I said placatingly, ‘I don’t know anything about divorce. But perhaps you ought not to do anything rash. You and Mickey should sit down and talk it over in a week or two. The situation might have changed by then.’
‘You don’t sit and talk things over with my husband,’ said Julie bitterly. ‘Mickey doesn’t worry about other people’s feelings. He doesn’t discuss things. He makes up his mind and that’s it.’
‘He might not go to Spain with Lisa,’ I ventured, wondering how far I could go.
Julie shrugged. ‘Whether they go or stay, I hope she takes him for every penny, but not every penny that belongs to me.’ She squashed out the remains of her cigarette and stood up. ‘Well, let’s take a look around, since we’re all here.’
‘You look,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving.’
But Julie had pulled open the door to the dressing room. ‘Strewth!’ we heard her exclaim. There was a silence, broken only by the rustle of cloth. She was rummaging along the dress rack. Then she came out, her face set white and furious, and marched past both Donald and me, without a word, into the kitchen. There was the sound of a drawer being dragged open, a clatter, and she came out holding a wicked-looking knife.
I scurried behind Donald but it wasn’t me she was after. She went back into the dressing room and the ensuing tearing and ri
pping sounds indicated she was busy shredding all that designer wear into tatters. In between her efforts we could hear her muttering to herself, ‘Little bitch! You won’t wear that again! Look at this! Must have cost a couple of grand! Well, you’ll be able to use it for dusters now, Miss Lisa!’
‘Donald,’ I whispered, edging out from behind the sofa. ‘Don’t you think you ought to stop her? Isn’t it criminal damage or something?’
Donald, still relaxed on the sofa without any sign of being about to move, proved he could speak.
‘You don’t never argue,’ he wheezed, ‘with a woman holding a ruddy great carving knife.’
Fair enough. I tiptoed out of the flat, leaving Julie to it.
Chapter Ten
‘Do you know what?’ I asked my audience at large. ‘I thought Mickey Allerton was older, well into his fifties. But if Julie’s telling the truth, he’s not more than forty-six. He looks pretty good, mind you, but still at least ten years older than he is.’