A Darker Shade of Blue (29 page)

‘Probably not.'

‘You're not some crazy fan?'

Kiley shook his head.

‘No, I suppose you're not.' She took one last drag at her cigarette. ‘Just as long as you're here, there's a bottle of wine in that excuse for a fridge. Why don't you grab a couple of those glasses, pour us both a drink? Then you can tell me what you really want.'

The wine was a little sweet for Kiley's taste and not quite cold enough.

‘Are you planning to see Dianne Adams while she's in town?' Kiley said.

‘Oh, shit!' A little of the wine spilled on Virginia's robe. ‘Did Keith send you?'

‘I think I'm batting for the other side.'

‘You think?'

‘He threatened her before.'

‘That's just his way.'

‘His way sometimes extends to hit and run.'

‘That's bullshit!'

‘Is it?'

Virginia swung her legs around and faced the mirror; dabbed cream on to some cotton wool and wiped the residue of make-up from around her eyes.

‘Keith,' Kiley said. ‘You let him know about the card and the champagne.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Just like you let him know about you and Dianne …'

Virginia laughed, low and loud. ‘It keeps him on his toes.'

‘Then shall we say it's served its purpose this time? You'll keep away? Unless you want her to get hurt, that is?'

She looked at him in the mirror. ‘No,' she said. ‘I don't want that.'

His phone rang almost as soon as he stepped through the door. Costain.

‘Why don't you get yourself a mobile, for fuck's sake? I've been trying to get hold of you the best part of an hour.'

‘What happened?'

‘Keith Payne came to the club, walked right in off the street in the middle of rehearsals. Couple of his minders with him. One of the staff tried to stop them and got thumped for his trouble. Wanted to talk to Dianne, that's what he said. Talk to her on her own.'

Kiley waited, fearing the worst.

‘Your pal, Becker, all of a sudden he's got the balls of a brass monkey. Told Payne to come back that evening, pay his money along with all the other punters. Miss Adams was an artiste and right now she was working.' Costain couldn't quite disguise his admiration. ‘I doubt anyone's spoken to Keith Payne like that in twenty years. Not and lived to tell the tale.'

‘He didn't do anything?'

‘Someone from the club had called the police. Payne obviously didn't think it was worth the hassle. Turned around and left. But you should have seen the expression on his face.'

Kiley thought he could hazard a guess.

Later that evening he phoned Virginia Pride at the theatre. ‘Your husband, I need to see him.'

*

The house was forty minutes north of London, nestled in the Hertfordshire countryside, the day warm enough for Payne to be on a lounger near the pool. A gofer brought them both a cold beer.

‘Hear that,' Payne said. ‘Fuckin' birdsong. Amazing.'

Kiley could hear birds sometimes, above the noise of traffic from the Holloway Road. He kept it to himself.

‘Ginny says you went to see her.'

‘Dianne Adams, I wanted to make sure there wouldn't be any trouble.'

‘If that dyke comes sniffin' round …'

‘She won't.'

‘That business with her and Ginny, a soddin' aberration. All it was. Over and done. And then Ginny, all of a sudden she's sending fuckin' champagne and fuck knows what.'

‘You want to know what I think?' Kiley said.

A flicker of Payne's pale blue eyes gave permission.

‘I think she does it to put a hair up your arse.'

Payne gave it a moment's thought and laughed. ‘You could be right.'

‘And Becker, he was just sounding off. Trying to look big.'

‘People don't talk to me like that. Nobody talks to me like that. Especially a tosser like him.'

‘Sticks and stones. Besides, like you say, who is he? Becker? He's nothing.'

Swift to his feet for a big man, Payne held out his hand. ‘You're right.'

‘You won't hold a grudge?'

Payne's grip was firm. ‘You've got my word.'

*

The remainder of Dianne Adams' engagement passed off without incident. Virginia Pride stayed away. By the final weekend it was standing room only and, spurred on by the crowd and the band, Adams' voice seemed to find new dynamics, new depth.

Of course, Becker told her about the bracelet during one of those languorous times when they lay in her hotel bed, feeling the lust slowly ebb away. He even offered it to her as a present, half-hoping she would refuse, which she did. ‘It's beautiful,' she said. ‘And it's a beautiful thought. But it's your good-luck charm. You don't want to lose it now.'

On the last night at Ronnie's, she thanked him profusely on stage for his playing and presented him with a charm in the shape of a saxophone. ‘A little something to remember me by.'

‘You know,' she said, outside on the pavement later, ‘next month we've got this tour, Italy, Switzerland. You should come with us.'

‘I'd like that,' Becker said.

‘I'll call you,' she said, and kissed him on the mouth.

She never did.

Costain thanked Kiley for a job well done and with part of his fee Kiley acquired an expensive mobile phone and waited for that also to ring.

*

Three weeks later, as Derek Becker was walking through Soho after a gig in Dean Street, gone one a.m., a car pulled up alongside him and three men got out. Quiet and quick. They grabbed Becker and dragged him into an alley and beat him with gloved hands and booted feet. Then they threw him back against the wall and two of them held out his arms at the wrist, fingers spread, while the third drew a pair of pliers from the pocket of his combat pants. One of them stuffed a strip of towelling into his mouth to stifle the screams.

Becker's instrument case had already fallen open to the ground, and as they left, one of the men trod almost nonchalantly on the bell of the saxophone before booting it hard away. A second man picked up the case and hurled it into the darkness at the alley's end, the bracelet, complete with its newly attached charm, sailing unseen into the deepest corner, carrying with it all of Becker's new-found luck.

It was several days before Kiley heard what had happened and went to see Becker in his flat in Walthamstow, bringing a couple of paperbacks and a bottle of single malt.

‘Gonna have to turn the pages for me, Jack. Read them as well.'

His hands were still bandaged and his left eye still swollen closed.

‘I'm sorry,' Kiley said and opened the Scotch.

‘You know what, Jack?' Becker said, after the first sip. ‘Next time, don't do me no favours, right?'

ASYLUM

The van had picked them up a little after six, the driver cursing the engine which had stubbornly refused to start; fourteen of them cramped into the back of an ailing Ford as it rattled and lurched along narrow roads, zip-up jackets, boots, jeans, the interior thick with cigarette smoke. Outside, light leaked across the Fens. Jolted against one another, the men sat, mostly silent, heads down, a few staring out absently across the fields. Field after field the same. When anyone did speak it was in heavily accented English, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian. There were lights in the isolated farms, the small villages they passed through, children turning in their beds and waking slowly to the half-remembered lines they would sing at Harvest Festival. Thanks for plenty. Hymns of praise. The air was cold.

Some ten miles short of Ely, the van turned off along a rough track and bumped to a halt behind a mud-spattered tractor and several other vans. On trestle tables beneath a makeshift canopy, men and women were already working, sorting and wrapping cauliflowers in cellophane. Towards the far side of the field, indistinct in the havering mist, others moved slowly in the wake of an ancient harvester, straightening and bending, straightening and bending, loading cabbages into the low trailer that rattled behind.

A man in a dark fleece, gloves on his fists, stepped towards the van. ‘What sort of fuckin' time d'you call this?'

The driver shrugged and grinned.

‘Laugh the other side of your fuckin' face, one o' these fine days.'

The driver laughed nervously and, taking the makings from his pocket, started to roll a cigarette. Most of the men had climbed down from the van and were standing in a rough circle, facing inwards, hands jammed down into their pockets as they stamped their feet. The others, two or three, sat close against the open door, staring out.

‘You,' the foreman said, waving his fist. ‘You. Yes, you. What d'you think this is? Fuckin' holiday? Get the fuck out of there and get to fuckin' work.'

Across the slow spread of fields to the west, the blunt outline of Ely Cathedral pushed up from the plane of earth and bulked against the sky.

*

A hundred or so miles away, in North London, the purlieu of Highbury Fields, Jack Kiley woke in a bed that was not his own. From the radio at the other side of the room came the sounds of the
Today
programme, John Humphrys at full bite, castigating some hapless politician for something he or she had done or failed to do. Kiley pushed back the quilt and rolled towards the edge of the bed, feet quick to the floor. In the bathroom he relieved himself and washed his hands, splashed cold water in his face. At least now Kate was allowing him to leave a toothbrush there, a razor too, and he used both before descending.

Kate sat at the breakfast table, head over her laptop, fingers precise and quick across the keys. Kiley knew better than to interrupt. There was coffee in the cafetieré and he poured some into Kate's almost empty mug before helping himself. His selflessness was acknowledged by a grunt and a dismissive wave of the hand.

A mound of the day's papers, including the
Independent,
for whom Kate wrote a weekly column, was on a chair near the door, and Kiley carried them across to the padded seat in the window bay. Through the glass he could see the usual dog walkers in the park, joggers skirting the edge, more than one of them pushing those three-wheeler buggies that cost the price of a small second-hand car.

Automatically, he looked at the sports pages first to check the results and saw, with no satisfaction, that one of the teams he used to played for had now gone five matches without scoring a goal. Below the fold on the front page, the second lead was about the wife of a Home Office minister being attacked and robbed not so very far from where he was now.

‘
In the early hours of yesterday morning, Helen Forester, wife of …
'

What in God's name was she doing, Kiley thought, wandering around the nether end of Stoke Newington at two in the morning? He checked the other papers. Only the disintegrating marriage of a B-celebrity soap star prevented the story from making a full sweep of the tabloids, ‘
Minister's Wife Mugged
' and similar dominating the rest in one-inch type. A library photograph of Helen Forester accompanying her husband to the last party conference was the most popular, her narrow, rather angular face strained beneath a round, flat-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Spanish bullfighters, her husband mostly cropped out.

‘
Mrs Forester was found in a dazed state by passers-by and taken to Homerton hospital, where she was treated for minor injuries and shock
.'

‘I know her,' Kate said, looking up from her work. ‘Interviewed her for a piece on politicians' wives. After all that fuss about Betsy what's-her-name. I liked her. Intelligent. Mind of her own.'

‘Must have been switched off when this happened.'

‘Maybe.'

‘You think there's more to it than meets the eye?'

‘Isn't there always?'

‘You're the journalist, you tell me.'

Kate shot him a sour glance and went back to the piece she was writing – ‘
No More Faking It: the rehabilitation of Meg Ryan in
In the Cut.'

‘At least it makes a change,' Kiley said, ‘from MPs caught out cottaging on Clapham Common.'

But Kate had already switched him off.

By midday the Minister concerned had issued a brief statement. ‘
My wife and I are grateful for all of the flowers and messages of support…
'

The Shadow Home Secretary materialised long enough to fire the usual tired salvos about the unsafe streets of our cities and the need for more police officers on the beat. Nothing yet about what the unfortunate Mrs Forester had been doing out alone when she might more properly have been tucked up alongside her husband in the safety of their Islington flat or at their constituency home. That, Kiley was sure, would come.

Cafe tables were spread along the broad pavement north of Belsize Park underground station, and Kiley was sitting in the early autumn sunshine nursing a cappuccino and wondering what to do with the rest of the day.

Almost directly opposite, above the bookshop, his small two-room office held little attraction: the message light on the answerphone was, as far as he knew, not flickering, no urgent faxes lay waiting, any bills he was concerned with paying had been dealt with and his appointment book, had he possessed one, would have been blank. He could walk up the hill on to Hampstead Heath and enjoy the splendours of the turning leaves or stroll across to the Screen on the Hill and sit through the matinee of something exotic and life-affirming.

Then again, he could order another cappuccino, while he considered the possibility of lunch. Irena, the young Romanian waitress who moonlighted two mornings a week as his bookkeeper and secretary, was not on duty, and he caught the eye of a waiter, who by his accent was Spanish and most probably from Latin America. At one of the nearby tables, a May-November couple were holding hands and staring into one another's eyes; at another, a man in a ‘
Fight Global Capitalism
' T-shirt was listening contentedly to his iPod, and just within his line of vision, a young woman of twenty-two or -three, wearing dark glasses and a seriously abbreviated cerise top, was poring over
The Complete Guide to Yoga.
In small convoys, au pairs propelled their charges along the pavement opposite. The sun continued to shine. What was a seemingly intelligent, middle-aged middle-class woman doing, apparently alone, at the wrong end of Stoke Newington High Street at that hour of the morning? Like a hangnail, it nagged at him and wouldn't let him rest.