by Mick Herron
The joke was, they’d called it real money – telephone numbers; serious dosh. She’d earned real money too. But she’d never seen that, either; for several years, Louise had barely carried cash, beyond the odd fiver for emergencies. Life and shopping had been conducted with plastic. The realer money was, the less you had to confront it. It operated differently; you never fished it from a pocket and counted it out, but its presence lent weight to your daily existence, enabling you to see things others didn’t, and ignore things that shouldn’t be there. Real money’s weight was a buffer against the unpleasant. Louise had eaten in restaurants where they didn’t put prices on the menu, and hadn’t even noticed at the time.
‘There is lot of money involved.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Miro was good at his job,’ Jaime said.
Louise had been good at hers.
Good at it, but had found a way to screw it up all the same: sleeping with the boss, it turned out, was a terrible idea. Who’d have thought it? There was a man with a gun not ten feet away, and another man trying to talk him down from whatever ledge he was on, but although she was listening to these men talking – ‘He could tell you square roots of big numbers, from his head. With no paper.’
‘That’s quite a talent.’
– part of her mind was on Crispin Tate, and the reason for that was stamped on the calendar. Today, of all days, he was likely to weigh heavy on her mind. Even before all this, he’d been rattling in her head, because she could remember exactly where she’d been two years ago.
But every day was an anniversary; something had always happened, good or bad. And sometimes whichever it was shaded from one to the other with the passage of time; last year, today had been a good anniversary; this year, it was bad . . . Last year Louise and Crispin had celebrated their first anniversary, returning to the restaurant they’d first visited (of course), where she’d even – a blush-making admission – chosen the same dish from the same, unpriced menu. And had assumed the evening would be ending in the same fashion, but Darling, I’m so sorry – I have to be home, it’s Charlie’s birthday tomorrow. So how come it hadn’t been Charlie’s birthday tomorrow last year? But she hadn’t thought of asking until he’d left. And anyway, by then, Louise had grown used to abrupt departures and curtailed conversations; to being placated instead of wooed.
In well-arranged marriages, brides learned to love their husbands one quality at a time: a particular habit of kindness, the curve of an elbow, the occasional display of tact. For other women, when their poorly arranged affairs ended badly, the problem was neatly reversed, with no shortage of qualities to learn to hate – the assumption that she’d be there when he wanted her; the cancellation of dates without warning. His particular habit of being married, with children. The name Crispin was hardly a bonus, either. Such matters began small, but grew and grew. She wasn’t sure she hated Crispin yet, and knew she was lead-ing a better life now – felt a fuller person. But also knew that he’d come out of it unscathed; that she’d been the one forced to make changes.
Changes which had left her here.
The spy and the gunman, Jaime, were still at it; the name Miro flashing back and forth, as if the two were on their own separate page. Are you the lady? Jaime had asked. She was the only lady here, since you couldn’t count Judy. Maybe Eliot had had it right, and he’d meant Claire Christopher, who’d chosen today of all days to have a dental appointment – unless that had been deliberate . . . And as soon as the thought formed, Louise knew she was starting to lose it. Claire involved with gunmen? That was about as likely as . . . Louise herself being here, now.
She looked around. Judy was a heap on the floor, a bag ready for collection. The boys were wrapped round their father’s legs; their father caught her eye before she could avoid it, and there it was again: the whipped-spaniel look, as if she were deliberately avoiding a serious discussion they needed to have. More important stuff happening, Eliot. Maybe that thought wave reached him, because the whipped expression intensified. Oh Jesus . . . It ought to be enough that there’s a gunman in the classroom, but no: Eliot had to be here too, giving her do you remember glances . . . At least the gunman wasn’t her fault. Whatever morbid psychology was greasing Jaime’s pistons, Louise couldn’t be blamed for it.
Are you the lady?
Louise closed her eyes. The men were still talking, but she was slipping back into last week.
She wasn’t much interested in quizzes; wasn’t, when you got down to it, much interested in Lizzie, but there was guilt attached to acknowledging that you didn’t enjoy the company of the unattractive; and besides, about the same time it became clear that Lizzie wasn’t taking no for an answer, it had occurred to Louise that this might be something her mother would like. And getting her mother to enjoy herself would be a pretty unequivocal indication of improved health, which would be a step on the road to . . . well, the road. More guilt came attached to that, of course. Tricking her mother into feeling better, so she’d go home: that couldn’t be good daughterly behaviour. Louise couldn’t be a good daughter.
All belief systems come with appropriate punishments built in. Even Louise had to acknowledge the humour of the situation when her mother started feeling unwell an hour before they were due to go out.
‘I’ll have an early night. You go.’
‘But I can’t leave you if –’
‘No, I’m fine. Really. Just tired. I don’t want to spoil your evening.’
Well, you’re making a pretty good fist of it.
And it occurred to Louise as she collected her car keys – because this was a no-win scenario – that her mother had never had the slightest intention of attending the quiz; that all her words and actions, from the moment she’d expressed pleasure at the thought of an expedition to the first intimations of head-pain an hour earlier, had been a calculated act of vengeance for whatever teenage games-manship Louise had employed twenty years earlier, when visits to friends of her parents had been in the offing.
‘I won’t be late.’
Her mother was already tuned into The Bill.
They were a team-member down, then, but in the event it didn’t matter. She’d recognized Eliot as the twins’ father as soon as he entered her field of vision: wandering across the hall, unsure of his destination. Already, she knew it was her table he was heading for – events slotted into place like that. Some people remained strangers for good and sensible reasons. With others, the connections were hardwired from the moment you noticed you shared the planet with them. It had nothing to do with sexual attraction, or even liking. It was simply that you were plugged into the same network.
She’d said something like, ‘Aren’t you the twins’ father?’, and he’d replied, ‘What are you doing here?’, as if he’d thought teachers were packed away in cupboards with the rest of the equipment come four o’clock.
A couple of hours later, they were masters of the evening.
10.47.
‘Where does this money come from?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘And I am stupid foreign person.’
‘I didn’t mean that, Jaime. All I meant was, I don’t know all the details, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to talk about them.’
What was the time? He could hardly check his watch. Bad manners, even when the recipient wasn’t holding a gun.
And the only clock in sight was a teaching tool: its plas-tic hands aimed at an optimistic ten to four.
‘Because you are spy.’
‘I’m not a spy, Jaime. I’m an accountant.’
‘You are spy accountant.’
‘I’m a civil servant. As Miro was.’
‘You work for secret services. Miro tell me this.’
‘Well, he obviously wasn’t all that good at keeping secrets.’
‘He should not have said?’ Jaime shrugged. ‘But he tell me.’
‘I don’t think it matters much,’ Ben said. ‘We advertise these days. Yes, Miro
and I work, worked, for a branch of the security services. But not as spies. We have desk jobs. Accountancy jobs. We work in the same department, on the same floor. So do a lot of other people.’
‘And there is big money involved.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Miro was good at his job,’ Jaime said.
Ben said, ‘He was better with numbers than anyone I’ve ever met.’
‘He could do . . . ’ Jaime struggled for a word. ‘He could do tricks, yes? Tricks with numbers. You know this?’
‘I heard.’
‘He could tell you little numbers that make up the big ones.’
‘Square roots, we call them,’ Ben said.
‘Yes. He could tell you square roots of big numbers, from his head.’
‘That’s quite a talent,’ Ben said. He didn’t add that that level of numeracy often accompanied a degree of social inadequacy. And Miro Weiss had been something of a social inadequate. Those nights in the pub, the football struggling in the background: conversation hadn’t exactly been free-flowing. It was a wonder he’d found a boyfriend at all, let alone one like Jaime.
‘Where did you meet?’ he asked.
‘Why you want to know?’
‘Just curious.’ He was trying to have an ordinary conversation here, chatting with a boy who was nursing a gun. ‘Where’d you meet?’
Jaime said, ‘In club.’
‘Right.’
‘I like clubs.’
‘I’m sure. I’m surprised Miro did, though.’
‘You do not believe me?’
Ben raised his hands, palms spread. ‘I just can’t picture Miro clubbing, that’s all. Not unless it was a chess club or something.’
‘It was proper club.’
‘Okay. I believe you.’
Trying to banish alternative visions of what a proper club might look like: leather armchairs, roaring fires, broad-sheets on handy tables. Pass the port, old man. Dammit, not that way.
Jaime said, ‘You are right. He was lonely.’
‘Well, he had you.’
‘Only because I talk to him.’
Ben wasn’t sure what he meant.
‘In club. I talk to him. Or he would not have spoken. I know this.’
‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘I think you’re probably right. Why did you do that?’
Jaime said, ‘You think it is because he is spy? You think I go speak to him because I know this?’
‘I don’t mean to upset you. But the people in my business, that’s the sort of question they would ask, yes.’
‘He calls them dogs.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The people you talk about. The ones who ask questions. He calls them the dogs.’
Ben said, carefully, ‘I see.’
‘That is why he says we must be private, about being friends. These people, the dogs, they would ask questions. They would say what you just say. That I am only his friend because he is spy.’
‘But that’s not the case,’ Ben said.
‘No,’ said Jaime. ‘I am his friend because he is lonely. And because he is nice, good man. You believe this?’
‘If you say so, Jaime.’
‘No, I not ask you what I say. I ask if you believe he was good man.’
‘He never struck me as anything else,’ Ben said.
‘But you think he is thief.’
‘Well, I didn’t know him too well. As I keep saying.’
‘He think you would believe him.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘It is what he tell me. If there is trouble, you find Ben Whistler. Ben is my friend.’
‘He said that, did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ Ben said after a while. ‘If this doesn’t count as trouble, it’ll do until some comes along.’
Picture this: the car, the man, the trollop – the black and orange rose.
Slumped on the floor, head in her hands, Judy let images swallow her.
For weeks before it happened, there had been telephone silences: the short silences of Derek phoning but having nothing to say, followed by the longer ones of Derek not phoning. During those weeks, the telephone squatted on its table like an unexploded bomb; like the bomb, say, that was waiting for him – the one he drove over in the jeep, with his trollop. A mine, they said. This particular mine being his; it had his name on it.
And after that, the even longer silence of the phone not ringing at all.
This silence, though, was preferable to the random out-bursts from the bigger world; the white noise that fills your head to bursting. Noise from banks, from the build-ing society, from lawyers; noise that came roaring upon her, like something tumbling down her chimney.
‘I don’t understand.’
Take all that noise, turn it into a song, this would have been the chorus: I don’t understand.
‘Your husband –’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Yes. But he remortgaged the house before he died.’
‘He never told me –’
The bastard bastard bastard . . .
‘I’m sorry.’
And he probably was, this banker, financial adviser, lawyer: probably was sorry, though once their meeting was over, he’d have sighed, shrugged and closed the book on Judy, then gone to do whatever he had to do next. Whereas Judy had to keep on being herself, in alien circumstances. At some point in this reordered life she had acquired new adjectives, each of which had had bite when applied to others, but felt secondhand on her, like clothing picked up at a charity shop. Abandoned, widowed, reduced. And wearing this new outfit – her widow’s words – she’d had to take, in this order, a room in someone’s house and a cleaning job. Judy had never had a job while Derek was around. He’d sometimes suggested she might like to work; had broached the subject in a tone that sought to imply there might be fulfilment in it for her, but there’d never been what you might call a discussion, because there had never needed to be: she had no intention of taking a job, which was precisely where the matter concluded. But now – abandoned, widowed, reduced – she had taken up mop and duster, because what else could she hope to do, after years of unqualified housework?
‘I’m sure we’ll get on famously,’ Claire Christopher had told her, offering her the job.
‘You can use the kitchen between six and six thirty,’ Deirdre Walker had said, ceding her the room.
If Derek was alive were more widow’s words; banging away beneath that other chorus like a demented drumkit. If Derek were alive, she’d have killed him. This is where he’d left her, after all those promises of instant riches.
And as for his trollop . . .
As for his trollop, when she summoned up pictures, the face she discovered was Louise Kennedy’s.
Judy wasn’t sure how this had come about. It hadn’t been intentional. You did not conjure up your dead husband’s dead lover’s face and deliberately superimpose upon it the features of someone you worked with: what-ever Jenny Ross had looked like, she wouldn’t have looked like Louise Kennedy. Face facts: Derek had been pressing sixty, and hadn’t been prized for his looks forty years ago; Jenny Ross, the newspaper reports said, had been just one year younger than Judy herself. But there were facts, and then there was underlying truth: this woman – this trollop – had stolen Judy’s husband: what image was she sup-posed to come up with? Trollops were trollops, and how-ever you painted the package, they came over-pleased with themselves, like a cat that had sucked up the cream. Disgusting.
What had she seen this morning by the gate? You couldn’t tell Judy there wasn’t something going on: once a trollop, always the same. Paint didn’t peel off easy.
She was hearing words bounce back and forth, but with eyes tight closed, slumped on the floor, all she could see was a rose in the desert – blooming orange and red.
‘This club,’ Ben said. ‘Where you met Miro. What sort of club was it?’
‘I tell you. A proper club. A place you g
o for music, for dance.’
‘And you struck up conversation with him.’
‘Yes, I tell you. He look like a nice man. He is nice man. So I talk to him.’
‘Aren’t clubs a bit noisy for casual chat?’
‘Sometimes we need to shout.’
‘And that was the first time you met him?’
‘First time, yes.’
‘The first time you saw him?’
‘You think I am tricking?’
Ben thought he thought that – tricking? He thought Miro had been a pick-up, yes. Jaime had a rent-boy look: slightly girlish exterior wrapped round a rock-hard soul, though the gun might have exaggerated the rock-hard part. But mostly what he was thinking was, he couldn’t picture Miro Weiss chatting up a boy this pretty. A man like Miro, middle-aged before his time, dressed like he’d fallen out of his grandfather’s wardrobe – only desire, buried by daylight, owlish by night, could have taken him into a club where the music banged like a drunk with a dustbin, and the drinks were adolescent mixes, astronomically priced. He must have looked like a credit card on legs. There’d probably been a queue forming behind Jaime. The evening would have ended in compliments and banknotes, with Miro thinking the latter a loan or a taxi fare.
‘I am not spy. I do not know he was spy. Not then.’
Tricking . . . Different kind.
Ben said, ‘Did you go to that club often?’
‘No.’
‘Do you go to lots of clubs?’
‘You think I am prostitute?’
‘I don’t think anything of the sort,’ Ben lied.
‘I like clubs. I like to meet people. Not to sleep with. Just people.’
‘Okay.’
‘He did not give me money.’
‘Okay.’
‘No, is not okay. Sometimes, yes, he give me money.