The Spoiler (24 page)

“Well, what do you suggest?”

He shook his head.

“Haven’t the faintest.”

“I thought you knew her pretty well.”

“We’ve crossed paths, yes. Swords even.”

Had he made a pass at Lyra?

“Well, maybe you can advise me on the best way of approaching her.”

“Approaching her?”

Now she thought about it, Simon had been curiously unsupportive when Tamara had first told him about the
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commission. She knew that his time at
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had ended swiftly and badly with the Aurora Witherspoon debacle. Was he concerned that Lyra was trying to poach Tamara from
Psst!
? Surely he didn’t see
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as a threat. Jealousy would be out of character. He had reservations about Tamara writing for
Me2
, concerned that Johnny would use her inside knowledge to plunder
Psst!
stories for his daily pages, but Simon had been generous to her. It was he who had first introduced her to Tim, brokering her Lucy Hartson exclusive and suggesting that she might do some shifts for
The Sunday Sphere
.

“I just need more clarification about what exactly Lyra wants on Honor Tait,” Tamara said.

“How much more clarification do you need? It’s an interview, isn’t it? Publicising a book? And if you can get the goods on the toy boys, you’re looking at an exclusive everyone, not just
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’s toffs, will want a piece of. It’s pretty elementary—hardly stem cell research.”

That was unfair. Tamara had spent most of the last year listening to the plot summary of his love life, an X-rated TV sitcom set in countless London flats and hotel rooms. Five minutes of his time was all she asked. Occasional advice on her career, in exchange for unflagging, nonjudgemental attentiveness on the subject of his sexual adventures, that was the deal. That, and her solitary evenings spent forging receipts for his expenses claims.

“I just want to know what angle they’d like me to go on.”

They reached the pedestrian crossing opposite
The Monitor
. Simon seemed irritated as they waited for the lights to change.

“Just write it all up and leave out the boring bits.”

Tamara turned to him.

“Simon, please. You know this
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job means a lot to me.”

“I know. I know. Look, don’t take Lyra’s silence personally. You know she doesn’t answer her messages—unless you’re Austin Wedderburn or you’ve shaken hands with the king of Sweden.”

The lights changed, and they started to cross.

“What if I just went up to the fifth floor, hung around her office until she was free and had a word with her in person?”

Simon’s step faltered. He laid his hand on Tamara’s arm. Was he restraining or reassuring her? Perhaps he was simply trying to steady himself after all that wine.

“No. I wouldn’t do that, Tam, if I were you. Take it from me, any approach to the fifth floor could be counterproductive right now. Just get on with the piece. Go and see Lyra when it’s done and dusted. Present it as an irresistible fait accompli.”

His pager bleeped as they walked into the building.

“Sorry. Just got to make a call.”

The walls were decorated with bright frescoes, painted in a more deferential and stoical era, showing pink-cheeked maidens in virginal white ministering to the picturesque sick. Glimpsed through mullioned windows, a bucolic Olde England—towering elms, thatched cottages, cheerful labourers, sturdy children dancing round maypoles—beckoned the lovingly tended infirm back to health.

As Honor walked along the hospital corridors, late-twentieth-century reality played out in drab vignettes all around her. A woman in soiled overalls was ineffectually mopping the rusty smears—blood? viscera? excrement?—on the floors, as nurses, not so young, some of them male, all tired and unkempt, few if any virginal, hurried by in what looked like pastel-hued nylon housecoats and slacks. They could have been chicken pluckers or fish gutters. And the sick? Like the old and the poor, they were never picturesque. Even ethereal consumptives, dying for love and too beautiful for this world, as the Romantics had it, coughed up gouts of blood and were reduced to double incontinence. Ill health was a great leveller. No one looked dignified in a dressing gown wired up to a drip, surrounded by the squalid clutter of convalescence and life support, the engorged bags of blood and saline solution, the bedpans and the sick bowls.

And Lois, beautiful clever Lois, was down among them now, her body racing to catch up with her disintegrating mind. Cancer. Of course. They said she was at her best in the morning, so here was Honor at 8 a.m. on Saturday, standing over her friend’s hospital bed wondering what Lois’s “worst” would be like. Her eyes were open and remarkably clear. Open and unseeing. They scanned the ward, Honor’s face, the nurse adjusting her drip, with what could have been mute amazement, like a
newborn taking in the shifting shapes and shadows around its cot. Or it could have been simple animal restlessness, a meaningless flexing of the orbital muscle. Behind the inky blue depths, there was no sense of any intelligence.

From some corners of the ward there were occasional outbursts of merriment and—how Lois would have loathed this—the debilitating drone of a television set. Other visitors, husbands, dutiful adult children, families with unruly toddlers, came and went to neighbouring beds, bearing fruit and chocolates and flowers, wholesome emissaries from a promised land of peak health and cast-iron constitutions. Honor suspected that there was an element of display, triumphalism even, about this parade of robust family life, and the cheery greetings cards around the ward. “Get Well Soon!” Was there a greetings card to cover the other eventuality? “Die Swiftly!” Honor had come empty handed, and on her friend’s bedside table there was only a stainless-steel vomit dish containing a used syringe. It occurred to Honor that, for form’s sake, she should have brought the garish bunch of flowers—another one—that arrived this morning from the foolish reporter. Honor had thrown them straight down the chute. But Lois, if she still had her senses, would have loathed them too.

A nurse, a boy with pitted skin and an earring, came to check the drain that led from Lois’s wound into a bottle below the bed.

“All right, Louise?” he said, and then he turned to Honor and winked. “Doesn’t understand a word we say, poor soul, but every so often she gives a little mumble.” He leaned over the bed again and Honor thought she saw her friend’s eyes widen in terror as he added: “Don’t you, Lou darling?”

Tamara stowed her thesaurus, tape recorder, cuttings, notes and printouts of her early drafts of the
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article, along with Tait’s two books, in a small backpack, and caught a tube to Maida Vale on Saturday morning. The jumbo bouquet of pink lilies, enough to fill a hearse, sent with an apologetic note to Holmbrook Mansions, had gone unacknowledged, and Ruth Lavenham had not returned her calls. What else could Tamara do?

She had handled subterfuge at a far higher level, most successfully
when she had snared the drug-taking son of the police chief. She had staked out the media-shy, too, camping on the pavement for three days outside Caleb Hawkins’s flat in Ladbroke Grove after the footballer had been secretly photographed holding hands with a transsexual at a gay nightclub. She had also been with the paparazzi when they had snapped Pernilla Perssen checking into a Hampshire rehab clinic. But Tamara’s new assignment would not be straightforward doorstepping. There would be no foot stamping in the cold outside Honor Tait’s mansion block, waiting to ambush her with a few questions. There was little point in bringing a photographer along. There would be nothing to see. Not yet, anyway.

She paced the area that was to be her patch for the next three days, sizing up the small parade of shops and the pub, the Gut and Bucket, next door to the café where she had waited for Bucknell before the interview. The café would be her base. One of its vinyl tables, set at a wide window, gave a clear view directly across the road to the entrance of Holmbrook Mansions. But first she needed to talk to a few locals. She crossed the road to the small supermarket and picked up a can of cola from the fridge. Sitting behind the till, the shopkeeper, so luminously pale and obese that he appeared to be crafted from melted candle wax, was breathing heavily and leafing through a tabloid.

“Been here long?” Tamara asked brightly.

“Since seven this morning.”

He yawned, illustrating the point.

“No. I mean the shop. How long has it been here?”

“Dunno. I only work here.”

“You must have lots of regulars. Customers, I mean.”

He looked up from his newspaper, then stared at the drink in her hand.

“You paying for that, or what?”

She handed over the coins. There was no point in pushing it. She would build the rapport later. She walked back to the café. It was run by two middle-aged Eastern Europeans, brothers, she would have guessed: one genial, one sullenly preoccupied, both broad and moustached. Their business was not sufficiently brisk to require a high turnover of tables. Tamara smiled at them, and they seemed happy to let her sit in a window seat, sipping at an infrequently replenished cup of weak coffee.

She opened her notebook and, occasionally turning her head to check on the main entrance of the mansion block, continued with her revisions.

It was easy to get swept away with the prose. She accepted another grey coffee from the glum brother and gazed across the road at Holmbrook Mansions. There was not a lot going on. She could just make out the figure of the doorman, who seemed to be slumbering behind his desk in the foyer, his peaked cap tipped over his eyes.

Half an hour later, the doorman stirred. A woman, fiftyish, brittly thin, wearing a silk headscarf knotted under her chin, pushed through the revolving doors and picked her way carefully down the wide stone steps into the street. She hesitated, looking left and right, as if unsure of her next move, then hurried away in the direction of the tube.

Outside the mansion block an elderly man, plump and florid, in houndstooth check, walked up the steps into the foyer.

If the old bat refused to come across with the biographical details, she could not blame Tamara for taking a few poetic liberties, drawn from her familiarity with BBC costume dramas.

Now the miserable brother was standing over her with a glass jug of vile coffee. She held out her cup and smiled. Perhaps she should order a sandwich to appease them.

The smiling brother brought over her sandwich, a fibrous flap of chicken breast, garnished with a yellow pickle, which oozed like industrial effluent through the spongy casing of bread.

She bit into her sandwich, then regretted it. Ah—the first sighting of someone under fifty! A small boy in a maroon cap and grey school uniform, like an extra from a made-for-TV heritage film. He was carrying a violin case and skipping down the steps accompanied by a sturdy teenager in a denim skirt, presumably his nanny. Neither, Tamara guessed, would be on nodding terms with Honor Tait. Somehow she could not imagine the old woman with children—they would be too chaotic, too noisy, too demanding. Tamara had some sympathy with this view. Gemma’s pair of squabbling toddlers were always poking their grubby fingers into orifices—noses, mouths, bottoms, electrical sockets—while their
mother looked on with an indulgent smile. Tamara had invited them round to her flat only once, and it was like being besieged by a horde of unhygienic dwarves. It had taken weeks to clean the finger marks from the walls.

The good-natured brother was signalling to her.

“Delicious, thanks,” she said, taking an enthusiastic bite of her sandwich and dabbing with a napkin at the yellow slime trickling down her chin.