She made her way up the pitted tarmac drive, past an old Mercedes estate car and a knackered Volvo. The house must have been worth a couple of million but had clearly fallen somewhat into disrepair. Breathing deeply to slow her heartbeat, she crossed her fingers. Pressed on the doorbell.
A thin, short-haired woman in her sixties answered. ‘Yes, dear?’ She treated Bev to a kindly smile. Her eyes were Doc’s.
‘I’m here to see James. I’m his friend.’
The mother’s face lit up, clearly identifying Bev as a girlfriend. ‘Of course. You must come in! Come in, dear!’
Bev was ushered past a battered grand piano in the large panelled hall to the front room. She sat awkwardly, perched on the edge of an overstuffed, chintz sofa. Drank in the dusty, fusty smell of decades-old soft furnishings that had been bleached at the edges by the sun and which sported a top note of wet dog. The yellowing paint on the single-glazing had been peeling a good few years, by the looks of it, and the windowsill was a jungle of overgrown spider plants, maidenhair ferns and broad-leaved something or other, giving the room a green tinge. It felt like she was about to be grilled regarding her prospects and her intentions towards Doc, whilst being offered tea in the best china and a side plate of slightly bendy digestive biscuits. Or maybe there would be questions regarding her fertility and willingness to make small Shufflebothams. She shuddered at the thought.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Doc asked, appearing in the doorway. He wore a rictus grin that belied the panic in his eyes, his mother hovering just behind him in the hall. True to his sartorial form, he was clad in drainpipes and a Metallica T.
Bev was transfixed by his pale, bare feet. ‘You have abnormally long toes. Do you know that?’
Doc’s mother pushed him into the living room, all smiles and handwringing and, ‘Well, well, well. James has never brought a lady friend home before.’ Bev could see Doc squirming. Spying the shiny-eyed fervour in his mother’s eyes, she didn’t have the heart to put matters straight.
‘Me and James have got some stuff to discuss, if that’s OK, Mrs Shufflebotham. I’m sorry I came empty-handed. I would have brought flowers or chocs but I’ve had a long journey from Cheshire.’ She was well-behaved Bev, now. The kind of woman who had shot to the top in the cut-throat world of big brand marketing, where likeability was as important as demonstrable skill and results. Be a Lovely Girl. Don’t sit like a builder. Put your hands on your lap and stop slouching. ‘This is kind of off the cuff. I really hope you don’t mind.’
Of course Doc’s mother didn’t mind. Soon, they were ensconced in his attic with the obligatory tea and biscuits on a tray. Alone.
‘Fucking hell, man. I’m supposed to be lying low.’ Doc flung himself into an old captain’s chair at a battered leather-topped desk. Spun around to the right. Spun around to the left. He stood up abruptly, almost hitting his head on the low ceiling. Scanned the world below the small attic window through what appeared to be a pair of stolen theatre binoculars. ‘What if you’ve been followed by Fitzwilliam’s feds?’
‘You’ve ditched your phone, haven’t you?’ Bev asked, thinking that perhaps she’d made a mistake coming all this way out, hoping for her occasional business partner’s co-operation and a free bed for the night. She conquered the urge to drag him back down into his seat and force him to look her in the eye. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you. This is serious shit, Doc. I read Fitzwilliam’s emails.’
Finally, Doc plonked his lanky frame back onto the chair, folding himself into an untenable shape, like human origami, put together by an amateur. He closed his eyes. ‘I can’t have anything to do with it, Bev. I thought I could step up and be . . . But that bastard killed my computer. I’m crapping my pants, Bev. I’m just biding my time, here, keeping my head down ‘til he comes for me.’
‘Do me a favour, you big banana,’ Bev said, not bothering to hide the ridicule in her voice. ‘The barman at the Merlin said you’ve been down the pub every night for the last week. Lying low? My arse.’
Even in the gloom of the attic, Bev could see her friend and ally colour up. The red in his cheeks was almost the same shade as the stripes on his now fully assembled Lego Darth Maul bust, which took pride of place on the desk.
He pressed his palms over his face. Groaned.
Leaning forward, Bev patted his bony knee. Determined to spare him the details of how some random pensioner had practically led her straight to his mother’s front door. ‘Cut yourself some slack, will you? I’m a PI ninja. It’s my job to track down wily motherfuckers who have gone off grid.’
‘Jesus. If I stay here much longer with the loser mates I grew up with, I’m going to vegetate. If I go home, MI6 will be waiting to serve me up a ricin kebab or rig a gas explosion. Either way, I’m a dead man walking. All because I let you drag me into this job!’
Bev ground her molars together. Chewed over her words before she blurted out a string of insults she wouldn’t be able to take back. ‘I didn’t force your hand, Doc. Don’t come that crap with me. Anyway, Fitzwilliam’s secret service mugs will never come after you. They’re just public school boys playing Action Man.’
‘Why are you really here, Bev?’ His blushes had subsided. His eyes locked with hers.
‘I told you. I read Fitzwilliam’s emails.’ She held her hand up. ‘Don’t worry. I never got infected by that virus.’
‘Whoopdedoo. Lucky you.’
‘He’s into other shady business with drugs and underage prostitutes from what I can tell. He orders them to a flat in London like pizza . . . from some guy called Stan. A dealer or pimp or both, I guess.’
‘Well, that’s only going to add weight to your case, isn’t it?’ Doc relit a half-smoked joint and inhaled deeply, wafting the pungent smoke out of the open window. Coughed. ‘Your client can use that to prove he’s not a fit father. But I’m guessing you haven’t rocked up here because you missed me.’
‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ Bev said, holding her hand out for the joint. Eyeing the Iron Maiden posters and tie-dye Indian wall hangings that covered up the cobweb-strung walls in this time warp of a bedroom. ‘In one email, he mentions a prostitute called Tatjana. He asks this Stan what they did with her. He talks about a film.’
‘Home-made skin flick with him as the star?’ Doc asked.
‘I guess so. Only I’ve googled the name, Tatjana and the word, “prostitute”, together with “film” and just got page after page of porn. There must be a million ropey-looking Eastern European actresses out there with lopsided tit-jobs.’
‘Porn Hub?’
‘Trawled it. I got bupkis. Nada.’
‘Maybe you found nothing because there’s nothing to find.’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘No. I can’t explain it. This guy’s a seedy bastard, right? He’s a bent politician. He’s a wife beater. He keeps asking this pimp for “spring lamb”. Young girls. So, that means he’s a kiddy-fiddler, too. Nope. I’ve got a horrible feeling a girl’s got hurt and gone missing on Fitzwilliam’s watch. And there’ll be evidence out there on the Dark Net.’
With careful fingers, Doc retrieved the joint from her. His shoulders had already settled from their hunched position. He leaned back in his Captain’s chair. Inhaled hard, held his smoke inside, exhaled it in a yellow-blue plume towards the ceiling. His voice buckled with the heat. ‘But you’re not getting paid to solve a missing person case. How come you care about some prostitute? Why d’you come all the way out here to find me?’ He was contemplative ; observing her through narrowed eyes.
‘Well, I was worried about you and wanted to check you’re still alive.’
‘Bullshit.’
Bev exhaled heavily. ‘It’s not bullshit. I was worried. But yeah, I guess I also want to know who Tatjana is and what happened to her.’ She could see the scepticism on Doc’s face. ‘Come on! It’s the right thing to do. And Jerry could be involved. Some kid’s gone missing . . . I think you’re a good person and would wanna know t
oo. And you’re the best keyboard warrior I know. If there’s evidence online of abuse or worse, you’ll find it.’
‘You think our shadow cabinet minister’s a lady-killer?’
At that moment, Bev’s phone erupted in a frenzy of buzzing and pinging in her pocket. She took it out and saw she had three Facebook messages from Jerry Fitzwilliam.
What’s new, pussycat?
Fancy dinner this evening? Meet me at my club? There’s a rooftop pool. Bring a bikini!
Jerry. Xx
She glanced at her watch – it was approaching six. Looked up at Doc. ‘I’m about to find out. What time’s the next train back to London?’
CHAPTER 22
Bev
‘I’m meeting a friend here,’ Bev told the hip young bearded man on reception. The stylish architectural lighting in the foyer of the private member’s club was a triumph of form over function. But even in the murk, she could make out the look of disdain on his face. She didn’t fit in here. Perhaps it was down to the hasty makeover she’d demanded from the Yves Saint Laurent girl in Debenhams, offering in return an empty promise to come back and drop a tonne of cash on cosmetics. She was catwalk hi-glamour, from the neck up ; Blue Cross rummage-rack, in ill-fitting leopard-print polyester, from the neck down. ‘Jerry Fitzwilliam. My name’s Cat Thomson.’
Yeah, stick that in your pipe, you snotty little arse-wipe, Bev thought as the receptionist’s expression changed from judgemental to surprised.
He scanned through the names in a visitors’ log. Nodded and smiled. ‘Ah yes. Mr Fitzwilliam is waiting for you by the pool, but we need to escort non-members upstairs. Someone will be with you shortly. Please take a seat.’
As she waited, Bev slid her fingers inside her handbag, checking for the fifth time that the filming and recording equipment was correctly arranged and ready to roll. She had brought it down from the north in the hope that exactly this kind of scenario would come up. With Doc’s own computer zapped, and his entrenched reluctance to do anything on his parents’ home PC, the equipment was set to record this time, rather than ping a live feed back to Doc’s laptop via Wi-Fi. If the recording failed, Bev knew this would be another wasted evening, putting herself at unnecessary risk.
‘Madam?’ A woman wearing ugly black clothing, with too many pockets and inexplicable ruching, tapped her on the shoulder. She held a clipboard before her like a shield to fend off the uncool and deeply average. ‘Follow me.’
Standing in the lift, staring blankly at the bad skin of the hostess’s cheek, Bev’s stressed bladder registered a mixture of relief that this would soon be over and trepidation that things could end very, very badly, should her seductive façade be torn down. Considering she’d been sharing a joint in Doc’s attic room only two hours earlier, she was hardly mentally in gear to play Cat Johnson, flirtatious bit on the side.
The lift opened at the summit of the building. She was marched past a glazed wall, beyond which lay an open-air pool that glowed with azure, floodlit stripes. Fat businessmen were lounging on recliners around the edge in their trunks, as though this were the Bahamas, rather than London in April, with a nip in the air. A couple in the pool were drinking and talking but not moving enough to cause more than a mere ripple on the water’s perfect surface. The light-spangled skyline of a nocturnal City of London blazed beyond. Places like this had given Bev a buzz in the past. Right now, her legs felt as though they might buckle beneath her at any moment.
Jerry Fitzwilliam was seated on a chair by the poolside. Manspreading, as if he suffered from hypermobility of the hips, his hands were behind his head, elbows wide as he gazed contemplatively into the pool. He wore blue shorts and a linen short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar. On his feet were pristine deck shoes. His face was lit from beneath by spotlights in the water, giving him a demonic appearance ; his thoughtful composure looked entirely staged.
Bev was all smiles as she was led to him. ‘Jerry!’
He rose to greet her, kissing her chastely on both cheeks. Shaking her hand formally. ‘Cat! How lovely to see you again.’ He waved to the chair on the other side of the low table by the pool, which was already laden with a bottle of champagne, two glasses and three small bowls containing queen olives, nuts and mixed nibbles.
With so many witnesses by the poolside, it dawned on Bev that her target might not behave inappropriately. Would her efforts at faux-seduction be thwarted?
‘Isn’t it fabulous that we both happened to be in London on the same evening? I’m so sorry I had to dash off last time.’ She set her daytime handbag on the already cluttered table, suddenly aware of how large and clumsy it looked. Silently, she castigated herself for leaving the neat little evening bag on her bedside cabinet at home. An oversight that could cost her.
Her date’s eyes transferred from her cleavage to the bag. The grin started to slide from his porcine face, giving way to a frown. The bag looked oversized and out of place. This wasn’t going to work. Damn it! She moved the bag to the floor, placing it between her feet. Without the barrier between them, he perked up, leaning in towards her.
They exchanged small talk about work – Cat Thomson’s ups and downs in the world of engineering, all a figment of Bev’s imagination, of course. The champagne helped the lies to flow. She steered clear of technical detail. Mainly, Jerry Fitzwilliam was happy to talk and talk and talk about himself. This deal he was brokering with big business. That law he was trying to get passed in parliament. Me, me, me, becoming louder and more animated with every glass he drained. Finally, his focus shifted.
‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot, you know,’ he said quietly, sizing up her thighs that were barely covered by her short dress. ‘Thanks for all your messages. I would have responded but—’
‘Were you too busy with your other admirers?’ she asked, coquettishly popping an olive into her mouth.
He guffawed, then. Topped up their champagne. Seemed to fully let down his guard, at last. ‘I realise I behaved like a bit of an oaf when we last met.’
‘A misunderstanding,’ Bev said, shaking her head. She needed the exact opposite to gentlemanly apologies if she was ever going to get paid. And she needed evidence of a secret London bolthole if she was going to do any kind of digging into his nefarious arrangements with a pimp called Stan.
‘I got carried away. It’s my wife, you see.’ He cleared his throat. Paused between sips from his champagne flute. ‘We haven’t had sex in years. It’s very hard on a full-blooded man like me.’
Ah. Here we go, Bev thought. My wife won’t fuck me. I have needs! Jesus, if I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard that line . . . She prayed his words, at least, were being picked up by the tiny microphone.
‘What about this swim you were promising me?’ she said, two glasses of fizz in.
‘Ah. That.’ His hungry grin betrayed an increasingly drunk man with adultery on his mind. ‘You brought your bikini, then?’
She crossed her legs slowly, treating him to a flash of her knickers. ‘Your wish is my command.’
‘Is it . . . scanty?’
Dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a napkin, she batted her lashes slowly. ‘Very.’
In the ladies’ changing room, Bev removed the hastily chosen new outfit, pulling it over her hair with a crackle of static electricity. The two-piece she’d flung into her basket had been designed to look amazing on a sylph-like eighteen-year-old. Now, Bev stood in front of the mirror, beholding her dimpled, overweight thirty-year-old’s body in the unflattering light from an overhead spot. The bikini dug in in all the wrong places. Her cellulite beneath the tropical-patterned lycra put her in mind of an elephant that had been covered with brightly coloured bubble-wrap. At least it would be dark by the pool. And men like Jerry Fitzwilliam didn’t look at the mantelpiece if there was the whiff of an opportunity to give the fire a good poke.
When she came out, the other businessmen who had been reclining on the loungers had mercifully left. But there Jerry was, already sitt
ing on the side of the pool with his legs dangling in the water, sipping some ridiculous-looking cocktail. Slurring as he spoke. ‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, young lady?’
A sore sight for young eyes, Bev thought, noticing how two of the hipster waiters who were collecting empties looked at her, sniggering and exchanging knowing glances. Or maybe they were looking at the shadow cabinet minister with his barrel chest full of blond hair. His big gut hung over the most revolting baggy swim trunks she’d seen since she and Rob had last gone for a miserable, argumentative, seemingly never-ending fortnight to the Algarve.
Setting her bag on her seat, so that the camera and microphone were surreptitiously pointed straight at her target, she slid into the pool. Gasped at the change in temperature.
‘It’s freezing!’
‘Good for the circulation,’ he said, slipping into the water alongside her.
It was reasonably shallow. Bev noticed him eyeing her nipples which protruded thanks to the cold. She sank further into the water.
‘You’d win in a wet T-shirt competition,’ he said, grabbing her around the waist.
She wriggled out of his grasp and swam to the opposite side and back, coming to rest conveniently close to her bag. ‘Actually, it’s quite refreshing once you get going.’
‘You get me going.’ He prized her hand free of the pool’s edge and slid it onto his crotch.
Bev could feel his erection through the fabric. Felt her olives and nuts coming back up. Relieved that he had crossed the line now that they were practically alone and he was full of alcohol ; needing him to say something irredeemably incriminating, she let her hand linger there. ‘Wow. That’s impressive in water this cold. I really do get you going, don’t I? What are your intentions with me, Mr Fitzwilliam?’ Giggling, to make it sound like flirtation.
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