by Hazel Osmond
‘Sensible guy, Joe,’ he said.
‘That’s why I married him.’
‘I thought that was because you were pregnant.’
Tess cuffed him on the arm and looked covertly towards the car. ‘Shh. That’s why I married him then. Not why I married him at all.’
‘OK, OK, and mind the writing arm, will you? Anyway, what’s all this about it being hard on me? You still do too much. I’d have made her sort out her own dental appointment.’
‘Oh really, tough guy? Who was it got her glasses fixed when she sat on them, and remind me, how many times in the last week have you cooked for her, hmm?’
‘Yeah, well, it keeps me busy.’
Tess gave him a disbelieving look and he took the point that they were both as bad as each other. Phyllida had them on the rack again with her drinking, and all they could do was keep her on her feet as long as possible and ensure everything jogged on around her.
When they reached the car, Mack sensed Tess was back on an even keel, even though there was still a ring of hiked-up brightness about her voice as she opened the driver’s door and said, ‘Right ho, everyone. That’s sorted.’
On the way home, while playing ‘I Spy’ with the girls, Mack studied Phyllida’s profile. At first glance, she didn’t look bad for a woman in her sixties. Up closer, though, the texture of her skin was like sucked paper and the whites of her eyes had a jaundiced look to them. She was dropping too much weight as well. Phyllida turned her head as if she was aware he was studying her and he pretended to immerse himself in the game of ‘I Spy’ again, but he was still thinking about her.
When he was growing up, he thought all mothers smelt of alcohol, just as his father smelled of the little Turkish cigarettes he’d taken to smoking since his stint reporting in the Middle East. The pair of them joked that they were ‘work hard, play hard’ journalists, with Phyllida swearing that she wrote better with a drink inside her. Hard to pinpoint when her ability to drink heavily had tipped over into something else. Five, six years after his father had died, he guessed.
After Phyllida, Tess and he had left London things had, despite the odd hiccup, got a little better, but since he’d been exiled back to live with her in Bath this time, the general trend had been mainly downwards. He wondered from time to time if that had something to do with him.
‘Phone box begins with an “F” doesn’t it?’ Gabi asked, pulling him out of his thoughts. He set her right before dipping back in.
Things might have been different if Phyllida had ever admitted that things were as bad as they were, gave what she was its proper name. Not a hope; too proud to say, ‘I spy something beginning with A.’
As they pulled up outside the house, Tess said, ‘I could just pop in and get Mum settled,’ and he answered, ‘No need,’ and was out of the car and round by Phyllida’s door before Tess could argue. Phyllida was getting some packs of chocolate buttons out of her bag and twisting round to give them to the girls. He heard her tell Fran how proud she was of her for being brave at the dentist; how grownup Gabi had been staying with Uncle Mack. He saw the little hands extended and his mother’s smiles and felt a rush of compassion. After Tess had hugged Phyllida goodbye, he helped his mother from the car, but she insisted on walking up the garden path unaided.
Tess wound down her window. ‘All that pirate stuff back there?’
‘A job offer. Nice of the guy really—’
‘It hasn’t come to that, surely? I mean, I know the freelance work’s been a bit slow recently.’
‘Slow as in none at all?’ He was trying to make light of it, but once he’d let that thought out, he couldn’t stop the other ones. ‘Never mind, still got my short stories … that’s if I could actually sell any of them. And then, hallelujah, there’s my ground-breaking novel. Any year now I’ll get off Chapter Five and move swiftly on to Chapter bloody Six.’ He heard the girls’ chocolatey giggle at the swearword and it made him pause. ‘Sorry, Tess, swearing and self-pity in one speech – you won’t let me have that “Star Patient” sticker now.’
He turned to see if Phyllida had reached the front door and immediately felt his arm being tugged.
‘Listen, you,’ Tess said, giving his arm a real seeing to, ‘you’re allowed the odd bit of self-pity, but things are going to get better, I can feel it. No, don’t laugh at me.’
Mack never would understand how Tess, despite the trials of Phyllida, had retained an optimistic outlook on the world.
‘And however bad it is now, it can’t be as terrible as when you were working for O’Dowd,’ Tess went on. ‘We got the “nice” you back when you lost that job. I’d rather have that one, even if he has to paint himself silver.’
‘Thanks, Pollyanna.’ He stepped back out of range of her hand and gurned at the girls to cover up the emotion he really felt.
When they had driven off, Tess shouting that she’d give him a ring tomorrow, he walked back up the path. Tess was right: working for O’Dowd had been the worst experience of his life and in the end he hadn’t been up to it, but at least he’d felt alive. Now the ‘nice’ Mack was bored out of his mind and drifting God knew where.
He turned and looked at the row of Bath Villas opposite and the streetlights coming on. You could almost hear the sedate hum of Bath life and the solid assurance that tomorrow would be very much like today.
There was no sign of Phyllida when he reached the front door, nor inside, and he went along the hallway and rang her bell. Nothing. He put his ear to the door. No sound. Looking through the ribbed glass of the door was useless: it made whoever was on the other side look distorted and wavering. Mind you, with Phyllida, that was often what she looked like after you opened the door.
‘Can I get you anything, Phyllida?’ he shouted.
A faint, ‘No, thank you,’ drifted back and he wondered what she was up to. He suspected it would involve a bottle because getting up and out this morning, being charming to the dentist – it all told him that Phyllida had squirrelled some drink away in the flat again and had a good stiffener as soon as she’d woken up. She would be desperate for a top-up now. Tess would know that too, but that optimism of hers often allowed her heart to overrule her brain and she would be hoping that maybe, just maybe, Phyllida was showing iron self-will and keeping her promise to drink only in the pub. It was a promise they wrung out of her regularly, figuring that in the pub she’d get less alcohol for her money and at least they’d eventually turf her out.
But … perhaps he was wrong to be so cynical about what she was up to right now. Perhaps the half-bottle of vodka gaffer-taped to the underside of Phyllida’s bed that they’d found last week was her last attempt at smuggling and hiding. After all, both he and Tess had double-checked all the usual and unusual hiding places regularly since. Only this morning, while Tess was putting her in the car, he’d swept the place again. It was a mad game of hide-and-seek and he wanted to shake Phyllida and say, ‘Even when you win this, you’re losing.’
Suddenly weary of the whole thing, he walked back along the hall and upstairs to his flat. Without even bothering to remove his jacket he sat on the sofa and must have dozed off because he woke to hear his mobile ringing. By the time he had extracted it from his pocket, the call had gone through to voicemail. Perhaps it was someone wanting him to write a ‘particle’.
He laughed at that thought, but the laugh became a kind of strangled cough as he retrieved his message. It was short and brutal, very like the man who had left it.
‘O’Dowd here,’ it said. ‘Meet me at the Stairbrook Hotel, Paddington, two p.m., Friday. Room 751. As they say in all the best spy films, I’ve got a little job for you.’ There was that nasty, raspy laugh Mack hadn’t heard for three years. ‘’Course, you could stand me up, my son, it’s no odds to me. It won’t be my mum’s name splashed all over the papers. Won’t be my windows getting smashed by bricks.’
CHAPTER 2
Mack had tried to prepare himself for this moment ever since that phone
call, and now, seated in the dull-brown chair drinking his dull-brown coffee, he watched the man opposite as you might watch a wild animal, in the hope that you could spot the moment when it was going to spring at your throat.
There he was, his ex-boss and everlasting bastard, Gordon Edward O’Dowd.
Before he had worked for the old slug, Mack had suspected that a lot of things about O’Dowd were constructed to mimic every hard-nosed newspaper man he’d ever seen at the cinema. There was the way he sprawled back with his hands behind his head, his suit looking as if it had been slept in and his tie always askew. There was the brutally cut hair; the Mockney growl. All he needed was an eyeshade and a curl of cigarette smoke to complete the picture.
Mack knew now that none of this was merely affectation. Gordon O’Dowd was a hard-nosed newspaper man right to the bone, one of the last, great, grubby dinosaurs, and there were journalists walking around with ‘QWERTY’ indented in their foreheads to prove it. Mack was sure his own backside still bore the imprint of one of O’Dowd’s size nine lace-ups.
Out in the wider world, anyone with a cupboard holding a skeleton took a deep breath when O’Dowd’s name was mentioned: ferreting out skeletons was what made O’Dowd happy; that he got paid for it was a bonus.
The important thing was not to show him how much he intimidated you. Which was why Mack, even though his heart had been on double-quick time since walking into the room, was not jumping straight in to ask why he was there and what the hell had Phyllida and bricks through windows got to do with it?
But whatever the reason he’d been summoned, it was huge. He could still smell a big story in the offing.
‘You listening, or am I just blowing hot air out my ass?’ O’Dowd snapped from the sofa.
Mack tried not to let that image burn into his brain and steadied his breathing so that when he spoke his voice sounded untroubled.
‘Yup, listening, but not sure why. What are you playing at? First-class rail fare up from Bath, all this secrecy? You’ve even got your Hobnobs out.’
O’Dowd glanced down at his flies before the realisation dawned that Mack was talking about the plate of biscuits on the low table in front of him.
‘Very funny,’ he said, ‘but let’s leave the small talk. You heard of Cressida Chartwell?’
‘I’ve been in Bath, not on another planet.’
‘Well then, you know about the feeding frenzy stirred up by her move to America? “English Rose, national treasure and hottest actress on the planet leaving us to live amongst the savages” – that kind of thing?’
Mack nodded, his brain now whirling around, wondering what the stellar Cressida Chartwell had to do with him.
‘So,’ O’Dowd continued, ‘what do you think I do when every man in Hollywood with a pulse and a penis starts sniffing around her?’
‘Send her a load of condoms?’
O’Dowd moved his jaw about as if he was chewing something particularly bitter. ‘Thanks, Oscar Wilde. What I do is I play it cool; I don’t go hurtling to the US or hire some cut-throat, paparazzi scrotum. I sit tight. I watch the other papers chucking any name into the mix to see if it sticks. She’s already knocking off her pool boy and the guy who delivers the groceries. Allegedly. Only a matter of time before they rope in the dog-walker.’ O’Dowd smirked. ‘If she had a dog.’
There was a long pause during which Mack felt like a gasping fish on a hook.
‘I get it, you’re just sitting tight,’ he said to fill the silence.
‘Yeah, because with Cressida you have to play slowly, slowly catchee monkey. The long game. Know why? Because for one, she has class.’
O’Dowd reached into the shabby briefcase by his feet and pulled out a thick wedge of magazines, before fanning them out, almost reverentially, on the low table next to the Hobnobs. Cressida stared up, beautiful and serene from the covers, working her ‘brainy totty and serious actress’ image.
‘Look at her. She’s done Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw.’
In O’Dowd’s mouth it sounded as if Cressida had been sleeping her way through the world’s great playwrights.
‘For two, our Cressida’s in no rush to hook up with anyone new; she’s just come out of that really bad breakup with Alistaire Montagu … that git who’s been playing that bloke in that Russian thing about those fruit trees.’
‘The Cherry Orchard?’
‘Exactly. Him. So I know I’ve got a bit of time to play with. And four—’
‘Three, you’d got to three on your list.’ Mack knew it was risky to correct a man who usually channelled Genghis Khan, but it felt like a small victory before whatever was to come.
‘And for three,’ O’Dowd agreed begrudgingly, ‘Cressida’s bloody bright: we’re going to have to be crafty.’
O’Dowd was staring at the magazine covers again and it was obvious that, like most males in the country, he had a bit of a thing for Cressida Chartwell. Still, that wasn’t going to save her from having her private life pawed over. She was a celeb, ergo, she was fair game.
Letting O’Dowd drift off into whatever obscene daydream he was having, Mack gnawed away at why O’Dowd was telling him all this rather than someone who still worked for him?
Like Serena.
He leaned forward and poured another cup of coffee, trying to stop Serena Morden escaping into his brain. It didn’t work; there she was: beautiful face, wonderful body, personality of a hired assassin. A light-fingered expert at turning over stones and seeing what crawled out from underneath. For five wonderful months and twenty-three editions of the paper, she’d been Mack’s. Out of his league one minute, in his bed the next. He and Serena had been going places; a tight little hit team. Mack, poor sap, had thought love was involved somewhere.
That had ended the afternoon when he’d found her and O’Dowd trying to swallow each other’s body parts. That they were doing it in Mack’s flat, in his bed, was a nice little touch on O’Dowd’s part, akin to a dog marking out its territory.
He’d backed out of that room like some chastened schoolboy trying to get away from the noises they were making and the realisation that he’d been dumped for someone higher up the food chain. As Serena had said, ‘An editor is an editor.’
Or ‘predator’ in O’Dowd’s case.
Mack felt the old anger spiralling up again, not buried as deep as he’d thought. He was back to wanting to shove bits of people into a shredder.
‘You were saying?’ he asked quickly.
‘I was saying, because I know these things about Cressida, I decide –’ O’Dowd gave a little ‘Ta-da’ flourish with his hands – ‘to get to her through her Achilles’ heel.’
Mack blinked rapidly, shocked that O’Dowd even knew who Achilles was, let alone that he had a heel.
‘Her Achilles’ heel?’
‘Yup. The lovely Cressida’s cousin, one Jennifer Roseby. Her mum and Cressida’s mum were sisters.’
Was that really O’Dowd’s master plan, to doorstep this cousin and her family? Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Mack had done it often enough, sniffing out the weak link who would dish the dirt for a nice, fat cheque and then beating the other papers to a buyout.
A buff-coloured file placed on the sofa cushion next to O’Dowd distracted him from those thoughts.
O’Dowd nudged the file. ‘Now, in case you’re not up to speed down there in Yokel land … Cressida’s father died when she was twelve, blah, blah, usual heartache stuff, and Cressida and her mother used to spend the summer holidays after that with Jennifer’s family. Since Cressida’s mother died, the Rosebys are her only family really. There’s two years between Jennifer and Cressida, but they’ve always been close. Get together whenever they can. Doesn’t make much sense … Jennifer’s a farmer’s daughter, gave up on a drama course and works in a library, still lives at home, while her cousin …’ With one hand, O’Dowd did an impression of something exploding. ‘But that’s women for you. On the phone to each other for hours. Jennifer’s the one person Cr
essida trusts.’
‘And how would you know that?’
O’Dowd looked particularly feral. ‘Don’t know what you’re getting at. Hacking and bugging, things of the past. Haven’t we all had the backs of our legs slapped soundly? Even if someone was still trying it, making out what these two are on about is a nightmare. More often than not they just start wittering on about people from their past … and our Cress is on the ball – doesn’t use voicemail, often resorts to pay-as-you-go phones. Means we need someone on the ground, if you get my drift.’
Mack had a horrible feeling he did.
‘The other papers have already drawn a blank with the Jennifer link. All they got to show for it was the local police buzzing around them like flies round shit. Jennifer’s brother threatened to feed Clive Butler to the pigs.’
‘Even pigs would draw the line at eating Clive.’
‘Right enough. Besides, Jennifer’s family don’t keep pigs. The Rosebys are into sheep.’ He picked up the file and chucked it at Mack. ‘It’s all in there.’
As if O’Dowd knew that Mack had no intention of opening the file, he reached across and flipped it open. Mack saw the words ‘Lane End Farm, Brindley, Northumberland.’
‘Northumberland?’
‘Yeah, as far north as you can get before the men start wearing skirts. Better take your thermals, my son.’
Mack closed the file again. He needed to nip this conversation in the bud, not get into discussing types of livestock, parts of Britain, thermals.