Never Tell (17 page)

‘No. It’s all fine.’ He stared out of the window at a field of seated cows. ‘Must be going to rain.’

‘James!’

‘I’ve just … I’ve been really stressed with work,’ he mumbled. ‘This threat of recession isn’t great for anyone. It’ll calm down again, I promise.’

‘Look, you know I love spending time with the kids – of course I do. But, you know … ‘ There were sudden tears in my eyes. I blinked them away furiously. ‘You didn’t even want me to drop you at the airport today.’

‘I just didn’t want you to be bothered with it,’ he mumbled uncomfortably.

I took another deep breath. ‘I’m lonely, J.’

This would be the moment he turned to me and said, oh God, I’m sorry, darling, I love you so much, it’ll be like it used to, I know I never see you, speak to you, pay you any attention, want to make love to you or even just cuddle you.

‘So you thought you’d get all cosy with bloody Xavier again,’ he snarled.

‘Don’t shout at me, please, James.’

‘I’m not shouting,’ he shouted.

There was a long pause.

‘Sorry,’ he said eventually. I could tell from his slumped bearing that he felt ashamed. ‘I just – I thought you’d left all that behind you. You write your stuff for the
Chronicle
. Isn’t that enough?’

I thought of Edna’s marrows and smiled wryly. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like you not doing Revolver or the label but opening a disco in Burford. You might enjoy it, but it wouldn’t be the same buzz.’

‘I suppose.’

I ploughed on. ‘The twins are in nursery every morning now. I just … Xav rang me, and I thought – I don’t know – I just wanted to use my brain again, I suppose. And it’s important people know the truth. That it’s reported right.’

‘You’re addicted, you mean. You replaced one addiction with another.’

‘I didn’t.’ But his words made me start. I
was
addicted – he was right – only I wasn’t going to admit it now. ‘I’m not really. I just miss it sometimes.’

‘But,’ James put his hand on mine. He touched me so infrequently these days the contact was almost a shock. ‘But you know what happened last time.’

‘Yes I know. But it was a one-off. I was unlucky.’

‘And before that? You were nearly bloody killed in LA.’

I’d been following the Vice Squad out there; I was in the wrong place at the wrong time during a gangland shoot-out. A police officer and a fifteen-year-old boy had been killed, the boy lying in a pool of his own blood whilst his mother sobbed piteously, cradling his head in her lap.

‘You’re not doing it, Rose.’

I slid my hand away. ‘What?’

‘Don’t be fucking obtuse. You’re not doing the piece on Kattan for either the
Chronicle
or Xavier bloody Smith, and that’s that.’

The slip-road to Heathrow was coming up.

‘Well, I’m not going to, you’re quite right. I’d decided not to already. But actually, I don’t think,’ carefully I indicated left, ‘I don’t think it’s up to you.’

James left to catch his plane without so much as a backwards glance, without giving me a kiss or even saying goodbye.

I sat outside the airport in the fumes and endless stream of vehicles, the airport I flew from at least once a month in the old days, and I put my head in my hands and cried.

I cried for my new confusion. I cried for my children and the inadequate mother I often felt I was, and my guilt at wanting other things, old things, like work and the buzz that used to be the career I had loved.

And most of all I cried with relief that my husband had gone.

When I pulled away from the airport, heading not for home but for London, so did another vehicle, tight on my wheels, though I didn’t know it at the time.

UNIVERSITY, MARCH 1992

I am reckless what I do to spite the world
.

Macbeth
, Shakespeare

After the scathing article about his exploits appeared in the
New Student
, Dalziel vanished. James said he’d been incandescent with rage; none of us was sure where he’d gone. For the first time this term, though, I felt relieved Dalziel wasn’t in town. My own faith in him was less solid than before; I sensed he was walking a tightrope between fun and hysteria, increasingly tense when we did meet. And crucially, I’d finally admitted I was in a spot of trouble myself. My new hobby was fast becoming an addiction. I’d even started to seek out the dealer when Dalziel was not around, and I recognised that it was a horribly slippery slope. I was actually looking forward to the oncoming Easter holidays so I could flee home to my parents. I needed to digest the crazy ride I’d been on this term; my tutors were not pleased and I knew I was already slipping behind with my studies. I needed some normality.

When Dalziel did return to Oxford a week later, good humour apparently restored, he asked us to meet, dressed for dinner. The esoteric elite, as he called us with a smirk, met in the pub nearest the city’s grandest hotel, at 7.06 p.m. on Friday 13 March. Much later I discovered that he’d figured it was also 6.66 o’clock – the number of the beast.

James, Lena and I perched at the bar, and waited for the others to arrive. Dalziel and Brian walked in some time later, Brian sweaty and uncomfortable in his monkey suit, Dalziel elegant and at ease in his tuxedo, though his eyes were glittering rather manically and his pallor was obvious.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, his pupils like pins. ‘Family business.’ He threw a car key on the table. His knuckles were grazed, I noticed, and there was a tiny spot of blood on his otherwise pristine cuff. ‘And a challenge to meet.’

Lena gave a knowing smile. ‘You did it then.’

Dalziel held a long finger to her lips. ‘Shhh.’

He was on good form at first, cracking jokes and stroking us all, physically and metaphorically, telling us how pleased he was to see us. I, on the other hand, was not. Despite my new resolve, I’d spent the night before at his house smoking with him until we’d passed out again in the early hours; I’d woken irritable and headachey and telling myself this had to stop soon. But when Dalziel beckoned me over in the pub and kissed me full on the lips, my fears dissolved.

He bought a round of sambuca and continued to massage our egos, asking us questions about our courses, our plans for the holidays. Later I remembered that James was cross because Dalziel was paying me so much attention, and Lena too was soon sulking, her oddly squashed face all tight and annoyed, her fingers tapping incessantly on the table.

An ambulance screamed by, closely followed by a police car, sirens blaring. Dalziel stared out of the window at them.

‘Big dramas, apparently.’ The flat-faced barmaid passed a pint over to an elderly regular, her raisin eyes alight with gossip. ‘Girl was in a car smash earlier over on the bridge. Hit and run, Michael said.’

Dalziel drained his glass and sent it sliding down the table. It would have fallen if James hadn’t caught it. The blue of the police-car light was reflected eerily in his eyes as he turned back.

‘One more?’ Dalziel suggested, pulling a sheaf of notes out. We happily acquiesced, in no rush to leave the comfort of the pub. But now Dalziel’s good mood vanished; he became increasingly distracted, edgy and distant. When I asked if he was all right he smiled and said he was just tired; but he kept checking his watch.

The bar was warm and comfortable with its smoky hop-smelling fug; it seemed a shame to leave. But we drank a final shot of sambuca and then Dalziel handed James a parcel and an envelope that he brought out from his inside pocket.

‘This is for you, James. Don’t open the parcel until you need

to.’

‘And how will I know when that is?’

‘You’ll just know. You can open the envelope when I leave.’

James shrugged. ‘OK. You’re the boss.’

I must have smiled inadvertently because James shot me a filthy look.

‘Where are you going?’ Lena moaned.

‘I have things to set up,’ Dalziel said enigmatically. ‘I’ll see you all very soon.’ Then he kissed the top of my head and inclined his head to Brian, who leaped to his feet like an uncoordinated puppy and scampered after him. ‘We’ve got work to do.’ They vanished.

‘You’re very cosy,’ James commented sourly.

‘Don’t be silly.’ I smiled wanly at him. The truth was I was exhausted, hardly eating, hardly working right now.

‘Better get going, I suppose.’ James fiddled with the envelope. He looked vaguely menacing and rather handsome in his black polo-neck and tight black jeans, but his normally open face was taut and furrowed with worry. ‘I wish I knew what Dalziel was up to tonight,’ he muttered, tearing open the envelope. ‘He’s gone a bit weird, don’t you think?’

Lena returned from the loo. ‘He’s settling debts,’ she drawled, perusing the note. Her eyes were pinned now as Dalziel’s had been earlier: her pupils tiny and black. She smelled of sick and Fracas perfume.

‘What kind of debts?’ James said. ‘God, he’ll be all night.’

‘See the stolen chariot, dear boy,’ Lena mocked, dangling the car key on her black-nailed finger. ‘Guess whose it is?’

‘How the fuck should I know, Lena?’ James said. ‘Why don’t you enlighten us?’

‘Actually,’ Lena tapped the side of her nose, the left nostril of which was blood-encrusted, ‘that’s for us to know and you to find out.’

James laughed drily. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you?’

‘I fucking well do, actually, and you should keep your fucking mouth shut, dick-head,’ she spat. ‘Frankly, you should just be grateful you’re invited at all. I’ve never known what Dalziel saw in you.’

‘Likewise,’ James retorted, but he was obviously shaken by her venom. ‘Had a line too many, dear?’

‘I moved on from charlie a long time ago, baby,’ Lena said scornfully as she lit yet another cigarette. Her fingers were brightly stained with nicotine. ‘Mind your own fucking business, anyway.’

‘Yeah, yeah, OK, big girl,’ James snapped. ‘If you want to destroy yourself, Lena, that’s fine by me.’

‘Ditto,’ she said unsteadily. Snatching up her bag she disappeared back into the ladies.

‘That’s what he likes to do, you know.’ James looked almost angry. ‘I’ve been so fucking slow.’

‘What?’ I was confused.

‘Get ‘em hooked and in his power. It’s all about power with that bloke.’ James drained his own drink now and read the note. ‘He only wants us to go next door to the posh hotel. To the penthouse suite. Big fuss about nothing, after all that. And I tell you, Rose,’ he stared at me with the brown eyes that had recently stopped smiling, ‘one last blast and I’m done with all this.’

We shivered on the pavement, waiting for Lena. The sky was vast and the moon shiny and white. James pointed out Orion in the stars.

‘He’s the hunter, you know.’

I smiled at him. ‘Yes, I know.’ I looked at his freckled face lit up in the moonlight and thought what a nice boy he was, despite his sometime moods. Much safer than Dalziel. Therein lay the problem.

Lena stumbled out of the pub. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’ she slurred.

‘If you’re sure you can actually walk,’ James mocked.

‘Why – did you want to carry me?’ she retorted, but her vision was skewed and she staggered a lot.

We were like a bunch of shambolic squabbling schoolkids, I thought, hardly the elite society that Dalziel had envisaged. Without him, we fell apart immediately. I looked at us and for a moment, I saw what others might have seen. I thought of the scathing piece in the
New Student
. Not the sleek pack I believed I moved with, but a bunch of outsiders, lost and rather lonely. I shivered in the biting cold as James shoved Lena in front of him and towards the hotel. She was mumbling to herself; I was worried that she’d really overdone it this time.

We walked across the foyer as steadily and inconspicuously as we could and congregated outside the lift. As we waited, I looked through the stained-glass panes into the restaurant. And then I looked again.

‘God, isn’t that …’ I poked James urgently. ‘That’s Lord Higham isn’t it? Dalziel’s dad?’

I recognised his face from the newspaper. A tall, smooth-haired man with a long rather benign face and wearing a heavy navy suit, he was sitting at a table with a group of others: a woman in cream with long dark hair with her back to us, a boy of about twelve next to her, and an older white-haired man. It appeared to be some kind of celebration. Bottles of champagne, bouquets of extravagant flowers, cards on the table. And at the end …

The lift bell pinged and the doors slid open.

‘Come on.’ James pushed us all forward into the lift.

At the end of the table sat the peroxide-haired girl who had accosted me the other week in the pub.

The doors slid shut on us.

‘Who was that girl? Did you see her? Who is she?’

Lena leaned against the lift wall and, closing her eyes, slid slowly down onto the floor.

‘What girl?’ James nudged Lena with his foot. When she didn’t stir, he picked up her cavernous bag and rifled through it.

‘The dark one with the peroxide hair. On Lord Higham’s table. I met her last term. She had a go at me about Dalziel. And then—’

The hazy memory of a lost night in the Oxford Union last term; the night they hadn’t known I was there as I watched through the glass doors, aghast.

‘And then what?’

‘Nothing.’ I shook my head.

James fumbled with the coke he’d unearthed from Lena’s bag, scooping it straight out with his little finger and snorting it, and then offering a laden finger to me. I shook my head again.

‘Go on.’ He thrust it right under my nose. ‘Don’t be a wimp.’

‘I’m not a wimp,’ I protested. ‘I just – I’m not sure it’s my thing,’ but the drink was in my blood and the cocaine was right there, so in the end I snorted it. James leaned back against the mirrored wall and grinned, wiping his nose.

‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘James,’ I was shivering from anticipation and alcohol, ‘who was that girl?’

‘The beautiful one with peroxide hair?’ The doors slid open and disgorged us. ‘That’s Yasmin. Dalziel’s sister. He’s been in love with her for years.’