by RJ Bailey
I dialled down on the scorn a little. It wasn’t the club or the women or even Nina putting me in a bad mood. It was the whole Tom and Leka situation.
‘I’m setting up an agency. Managing influencers, mainly. Making sure celebrities come down to the clients’ places and post about their visits. This place is going to be the first. If we sign.’
It took a while for me to process this. ‘But, you’re a journalist. You hate PR as much as you hate social media.’
‘What I hate is being in a dying industry. Oh, I’ll stay in writing for a while. But look, some of these celebs will need bodyguards, or ELOs, or whatever you call yourselves.’
She knew damn well we were PPOs. She also knew I was right. She hated that world. But I was making her defensive. Her spines would come out soon. I softened my tone.
‘Sounds good.’
‘Well, not good. But a way forward.’ I think her eyes were asking for approval. I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t sound like a career she would relish. ‘Talking of journalism, I read a great piece by Adam Bryant the other day. You know him?’
I kept quiet. I might have known they were acquaintances. Colleagues. Rivals, perhaps.
‘It was about two women he met who got him out of a confrontation with some Albanian brigands.’
Gangsters, not brigands, I wanted to say. ‘Brigands’ suggests some sort of romantic bandit. Those guys had been anything but romantic. ‘Really?’ I said it with a what’s-this-got-to-do-with-me flatness.
‘Really,’ she continued. ‘It’s a great read. He even swears it’s true.’
‘Sounds interesting. When’s it running?’
‘It’s not,’ said Nina with an irritated shake of the head. ‘Rory spiked it. The editor,’ she said, answering my next question. ‘Said it read too much like Boy’s Own fiction. It’s one of the reasons I want to leave. If all we write about is a celebrity’s fragrant farts, we may as well just get out there and take the celebrity’s shilling. Anyway, you were in Albania recently, weren’t you? With Little Minx?’ She meant Freddie. They didn’t see eye to eye on . . . well, anything really.
‘Didn’t meet any brigands,’ I said.
‘Bollocks. Your Leka is Albanian.’
‘He’s hardly my Leka.’
‘No.’ She leaned across the gap between the two daybeds and lowered her voice, even though we were alone. ‘You know, it strikes me that there is only one way to solve your dilemma about who is telling the truth. About the rape.’
I knew what she was about to suggest because I had already considered it. ‘Ask Elona what she remembers.’
‘Yes. If you’ve already thought of it—’
‘I suggested it to Leka. He said he didn’t want the past stirred up. That Elona had suffered enough. He said if I ever went near her he would kill me.’ In fact, he also said if he ever saw me again he’d kill me. But he promised a truce, at least while I confronted Tom about that day in Kosovo.
‘Shame.’
‘Being killed? A real bummer. So, I’m not doing that.’
‘You know what I mean. She is the one witness that could tell you the truth.’
‘Tom reckons not. He says she is either traumatised or has been brainwashed, or both.’
‘How convenient for him. Then what are you going to do?’
‘I told you, I’m going to Asia to get Jess from Matt.’ With Freddie. Although, how I was going to pay for both of us was a moot point. Oktane, as the Colonel had warned, had not been cheap. And I never even saw the guy. We had only communicated via the extra phone I had been given by Inspector Gazim at Tirana airport, which I had destroyed as instructed once our business was concluded.
I needed cash. There was a job being advertised that might have tempted me in the old days. The whole-page ad that had appeared in Security Gazette swam into my vision.
We are looking for a PPO to accompany our well-known international celebrity client on a visit to Hong Kong for personal reasons. The successful applicant will be discreet and well versed in defensive surveillance. The client has received kidnap threats that she – and we – take seriously. The successful applicant will be part of a team offering 24-hour protection for the duration of the trip. Client stipulation is for at least one female to cover all possibilities. Mandarin or Cantonese an advantage. Clean passport essential. Proof of self-defence skills expected. Must be willing to submit to random drug testing. Salary negotiable.
‘International celebrity’ was always worrying. If it were true, it meant they drew unwarranted attention wherever they went. The Beckhams were a prime example. Very hard to keep them under the radar completely. If it weren’t really true, then it was a client with ideas above their station. And I couldn’t promise Mandarin or Cantonese.
No, it was a bust. Especially as HK wasn’t where I wanted to be. Close, but no cicadas.
Nina burst my speculation bubble. ‘How have you left it with Tom?’
‘He’s hurt that I don’t believe him. I’m . . . ambivalent. Also, he thinks I’m mad running after Jess.’
‘Why?’
‘He thinks she’ll find her way home eventually. Matt might be an arse, but he’ll keep her safe. He thinks I’ll just stir up trouble.’
‘Well, you’re good at that,’ said Nina.
‘Thanks, sister.’
‘So, it’s all over between you two?’
I puffed out my cheeks, a move I doubted many women in that spa could manage. I remembered my first meeting with Tom on the canal near King’s Cross, when he had cut his arm trying to repair his narrow-boat. He had seemed so confident, yet so vulnerable. And how we very awkwardly fell into his bed. Or was that his bunk? But Leka had cast a shadow over all of that. My feelings at this point were probably what they call bittersweet. With the former probably ahead by a length. ‘I think it is.’
Most spas in London hotels are built in the basement. It’s one of the reasons I don’t feel comfortable in them. I prefer clear views of the outside world and obvious exit strategies. Whenever a client has a day in the spa, I feel jittery. Especially if I have to join in and wear those gowns and mule slippers they all seem to favour. Have you ever tried running in those things? I have. I’d rather do it in Blahniks.
So, even though I wasn’t working, I was glad to emerge into the fresh air – of sorts – near Trafalgar Square and get a phone signal. After I had said goodbye to Nina, wishing her all the best turning from gamekeeper into poacher – although I didn’t use that phrase – I walked around the corner to a wine bar called Terroirs, ordered a large glass of Viognier to counter the effects of all that subterranean rehydration, and checked my messages. Several were from Freddie, who was comparing fares out to Singapore and on to Bali.
Economy or Business?
Well, my heart said one, my wallet another. I texted back, Premium Economy?
There was a request to get in touch from my Personal Finance Planner at the bank. I really didn’t want my PFP to know what I was planning to do with the rest of my money. There were missed calls from Tom, which made my insides do somersaults I couldn’t actually interpret. The final one was a voicemail from a number I didn’t recognise. It also took me a moment to place the woman’s voice when I played it back.
‘Hiya, Miss Wylde. Long time no speak. Look, I might need your help. Just for a few days. It pays well. I’m putting my head above the – what’s it called? – parapet. Can you call me on this number? Be great to hear from you. Oh, it’s Noor, by the way.’
Noor. Short for Nourisha. AKA the Angel of Harlow. I hadn’t heard from her since . . . since the days when stretch limos seemed cool. I’d always liked her. Despite everything. I took a sip of wine and pressed the call-back button. I might as well tell her straight away that Sam Wylde was out of the bodyguarding game for the foreseeable future.
THIRTEEN
She wasn’t an angel and she wasn’t actually from Harlow. But Angel of Bishop’s Stortford didn’t scan as well in the press. Noor was signe
d by a record company when she was fourteen – this was pre-streaming, when CDs still ruled and there was money in the industry’s coffers – released her first album at sixteen and her second just before her seventeenth birthday. The quality was astonishing given the speed with which they were recorded. Most of that was down to Noor’s voice. The young girl could transmute at will, aurally at least, into Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone. Add to that an ear for pop hooks and Noor was quite the package, appealing across a wide demographic.
She also looked great: tall, sharp-boned and funky. Her dad was an engineer from Grenada, her mother a teacher from Switzerland. She had been one of the first teen pop stars to resurrect the Afro and flaunt her many piercings, which she preferred to tattoos on the grounds that they were more easily reversed.
I was pulled in during the time when the tabloids went sour on her. You know, after about ten minutes. She had turned eighteen and was hanging out in clubs and bars. There were a few stumbling-from-the-Groucho-at-two-in-the-morning shots and a couple of her bleary-eyed and hungover having breakfast with her disapproving manager.
And then the Angel of Harlow got a boyfriend and wouldn’t play ball. Who was he? How did they meet? Have they had sex yet? All of which was met with a resounding: fuck off. One of the rags was offering fifty grand for an ID and an interview with Noor’s Nookie, as they’d called him.
So I had been roped in as a media blocker; someone to stand between the paps and Noor. I might not have had the bulk, but I was young enough – still in my twenties, with a young child and a prospective husband called Paul – to get into the same clubs as Noor and her pals without attracting too much attention. Sometimes a ‘lump’, as we call the big, beefy refrigerators some stars prefer as minders, is like a curiosity magnet. I was also new to the game and, I am ashamed to say now, I displayed a vestigial misogyny from my army days. As I said, I was young.
So there I was, sitting in the back of a stretch limo, three teenage girls opposite me, and no Mr Nookie, mysterious or not, in sight. In the centre of the trio was Noor, playing on her new iPhone 3G and cooing every time she found a fresh function. Like she would ever really have to use a spirit level.
To Noor’s right was Kassie, her bestie from school. Kassie was – and this is an example of me being very unsisterly, but here we go – the archetypal fat friend, so beloved of Hollywood. She was squeezed into some strapless, stretchy-yet-clingy material that she was always tugging out of one crevice or another, or pulling up over her considerable cleavage. Her cheeks were already red from the champagne she had necked out of the bottle she was holding, and her eyes had what I’d suspected was a Colombian-sourced sheen to them.
On Noor’s left was Romana, aka Romy. She was like a darker-skinned proto-Kardashian – again, this was before that particular plague escaped from the lab – with cheekbones so prominent they cast shadows down her face, a permanent pout and a striking aquiline nose, perfect for when she wanted to look down it at you. I’d quite liked her. She’d always acted as if something about the whole set-up smelled fishy. She was also wearing a similar little black dress to me, except hers never seemed to bunch or wrinkle whereas mine felt like it was only a single evolutionary step above a pound-store bin liner. Which was unfair as it was from Whistles, which must be several evolutionary steps up.
We were heading for a club in Mayfair, driving there from the Sanderson, Noor’s second-favourite hotel after the Portobello. It was fifteen minutes if traffic was light, down Regent Street, along Conduit, right at Berkeley Square. But we weren’t going directly to the club, which was on Albemarle Street. It had been set up with the deliberate intention to mimic/rival Mahiki and, although the newbie hadn’t bagged any royal princes yet, they had enough visiting celebs to make it worthwhile for some of the paparazzi to divide their time between the two clubs.
We wanted to avoid them.
To that end, there was another way into the new club from Stafford Street, through the premises of a personal trainer who catered to the time-poor, monied rich, including the odd pop star. Of course, the limo sort of gave the game away and I’d argued against using it. But Kassie had decided she never ever wanted to ride in anything but a pap-magnet again. And Noor had indulged her, over my objections.
Soon after we’d set off, I had issued some instructions.
‘Right, the idea is that we get dropped opposite the entrance to Joe Roberts’ place. It’s down the steps. There will be someone waiting to take you through to the entrance to the club. It opens directly into the VIP room.’ I had already scoped the place out while Noor was having a nap after a morning of radio and press interviews. Kassie and Romy also needed a kip, having run themselves ragged executing a harrowing Bond Street shopping sprint. ‘So, when we stop, don’t stick around to admire the view. There isn’t one. Straight in. I’ll be right behind you, just in case.’
‘Yes, Miss Wylde,’ said Kassie, giggling.
‘Are you coming in with us?’ asked Romy, making a valiant effort to keep the horror from her voice. ‘To the VIP area?’
‘I’ll be around,’ I said. I didn’t add that what happened to Kassie and Romy was not my concern, unless it impinged on my client. They could have sex in the toilets with a donkey for all I cared.
Always protect the Principal.
‘If I say leave, Noor, don’t ask questions. Just come with me. You two follow if you want to. The club has its own security and they’re pretty good. We’ve got a safe area set out, and we’ll have Vic parked up for a fast exit.’ Vic was the limo driver, an old-school chauffeur-cum-heavy who had done the job since the days of Led Zeppelin.
The stories he could tell.
In fact, he did, some of them at least, in a memoir called Rock’n’Roll Getaway Driver, a few years back. Sadly, the lawyers had gutted it, so the most salacious stories ended up on the cutting-room floor. Or in a safe somewhere.
‘Wasn’t like this when we used to go to Marlon’s in Harrow,’ said Kassie, playing with the various controls on her armrest. For a second, Inner City’s ‘Good Life’ boomed out at a volume that threatened to blow the speakers. She apologised and turned it down.
‘Well, Noor wasn’t worth millions to a record company when you were going to Marlon’s,’ I said. It was the record company paying my bill. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The record company had hired me, but eventually Noor would find herself footing the bill for me, the limo, Vic, the champagne, the club bar bill, maybe even the snowstorm up Kassie’s nostrils. One day, Noor would wonder where her generous advance had gone.
You can usually see enough out of a heavily tinted limo window to make out people gawping, trying to figure out who’s inside. This was before camera phones became ubiquitous, but still there were a few futile shots towards the glass as we slowed at the lights at the top of Regent Street.
Just as we were lining up for the right turn, a blast of cold night air hit me. The roof panel had been slid back and, before I could stop her, Kassie was through it, arms waving in the air.
She began to whoop at the top of her voice and wave the champagne bottle. Then she began to sing. Or, more accurately, wail. ‘Goodlifegoodlifegoodlife. GOOD LIFE!’
There was a thud on the window next to me. A snail-trail of froth was smeared down the glass. Someone had thrown a can. I wasn’t certain I blamed them.
‘Kassie, get in,’ I said.
‘Goodlifegoodlifegoodlife. GOOD LIFE!’
‘Kassie, now.’
I heard some lads jeering or cheering at her, I couldn’t be sure which. But we were crawling up to the right turn and exposed to the world. A thought reinforced when the next half-drunk can of beer plopped like a slam-dunk into the car and spewed all over the leather seat next to me.
I lost a little of my PPO cool at that point, duck-walked across to her side of the cabin and pulled Kassie down. ‘Close the roof!’ I yelled at Noor.
As I grabbed hold of Kassie’s waist and pulled, that pesky elasticated materia
l decided to ping down, unleashing her breasts in a blancmange of white flesh. As I yanked her away from the sunroof, she staggered as one of her heels bent under her and she lurched on top of me. I managed to shuffle a few steps back to reach my seat before collapsing with her full weight on me. It was like being attacked by an albino boxing kangaroo.
‘Get off me, you lezza!’ she’d cried as we had slithered on the wet leather. ‘I’ll do you like a fucking kipper.’
Exactly what that entailed I didn’t know, so I gave her a little slap. ‘Behave.’
‘You hit me!’
‘Not yet.’
I managed to push her away and across to her own seat, where she set about corralling her escaped prisoners back into captivity. Noor and Romy couldn’t speak for laughing at whatever the former was holding up for them to view. Noor, I realised, had found the camera function on her phone. I’d made a mental note to get that off her and delete the evidence before the night was out.
We’d ridden the rest of the way to the club in silence, the odd outburst of giggles apart.
FOURTEEN
I had lasted another ten days as a celebrity bodyguard. It was like herding drunken cats: exhausting, frustrating and far from rewarding.
I had been trained in small-arms combat, defensive driving and Krav Maga. What Noor and her chums needed was a babysitter with attitude. The attitude being: it’s all good fun. I wasn’t prepared to settle for that. My job was to protect my Principal. It didn’t always chime with the Principal’s besties having a good time.
I had asked the agency for something more challenging and they got me three months protecting a woman who feared her estranged husband was out to kill her. Better. But I made sure I had left Noor on reasonable terms.
Back then, I didn’t believe in burning bridges. These days, I take out both riverbanks too.
I waited until I was home and could FaceTime her. The call connected and she appeared on the screen, looking much as she had as a teenager. Face a little fuller, maybe, but skin still flawless, eyes bright and a smile on those lips.