Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

‘That’s good, at least.’ She paused. ‘How is she, though, Oz? Is she still broken up about Mike?’

‘She’s better now,’ I told her, truthfully. ‘She’s got herself a new goal in life. She’s made it in business, now she’s after a titled husband to help her climb the social ladder.’

Prim looked at me, incredulous. ‘Susie said that?’

‘Yup.’

‘That’ll be the day. Susie Gantry’s a Glasgow girl through and through, and proud of it. The idea of her in the drawing rooms of Mayfair. . No, she had to be kidding you.’

‘I don’t think so. Susie’s out for herself now; she’s through with sharing. She wants a husband only as a necessary part of having a couple of kids. When she goes shopping for one it’ll be in Harrods, not M amp;S, and there are plenty of exhereditaries around with an eye to the main chance, now that they can’t hang around the House of Lords, drawing money for the privilege of being privileged.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’ She paused as a waiter brought two cappuccinos. It was a different bloke from the guy who had served us until then. I recognised him; I hadn’t seen him in La Dolce Vita before, but he had come up in conversation at Shirley’s a couple of nights before. He gave Prim what was meant to be a knowing smile. She frosted him out, completely.

‘Change of subject,’ she said briskly, as if he had never been there. ‘My brother-in-law said I should ask you how you’re getting on with that script. Next month is drawing nearer, my darling, when you learn to become a real actor.’

What the hell does she think I am now? I wondered.

Prim was up and about before me next morning. Her half of the bed was empty, not even warm, when I awoke. I rose and stumbled downstairs a few minutes later, showered but unshaven. . I had decided that if I was an actor, then I might as well look like one.

As I shambled into the kitchen, in search of cornflakes and coffee, I heard the phone being replaced.

‘Who was that?’ I asked Prim.

She gave me a slightly guilty look. ‘I phoned Veronique,’ she admitted. ‘I wanted to know how your girl was.’

‘You didn’t suggest that she give her a job did you?’

‘No I did not. If you must know, I thought I’d quite like to meet her. I’m too late though. You’ll be pleased to hear that Ramon’s taking her down to Barcelona this morning. The Filipinos have arranged her return home.’

I was mildly surprised. ‘That was quick,’ I said as Prim vanished through to the living area. ‘I thought it would have taken a week at least, not forty-eight hours.’

I filled the percolator, put it on the hob and filled a couple of bowls with cereal. Then, as soon as the coffee was ready, I poured two mugs, put the lot on a tray, with a large jug of milk and carried it through.

Prim was sitting on the smaller of the two sofas, with her back to me as I came into the big room. I put the tray on the coffee table, ‘Dig in,’ I said, glancing at her. She looked back at me with narrowed eyes. Her mouth was a slit. I had never seen her face like that before, never in my life. Then I saw the envelope on the floor; A4 brown manila, with ‘Prim’, printed on the outside in big, bold letters.

She was leaning forward slightly, obscuring the papers on her lap. Then she seized them and thrust them at me, furiously. I took them from her.

They were photographs; of me, and of Susie Gantry. The first had a matt finish, and I guessed it had been taken by a digital camera then run off from a computer through a colour printer. It showed the two of us, in Roser Dos; Susie was holding my left hand to her lips, kissing it lightly. The second had been processed conventionally. It had been taken with a telephoto lens at Barcelona Airport, a perfect candid shot of our last goodbye kiss.

‘You weren’t kidding, were you?’ Prim hissed. ‘I asked you what you and she had done, and you told me you’d shagged each other senseless. You weren’t kidding, were you, you fucking horrible bastard?’

I thought, as I stood there looking at the prints, of many things; of Susie and me, of Prim and me in the good times, of the sneaky bastard who had taken the things and was going to pay for them in broken bones, and, most urgently, of how I could cool the situation.

‘Come on, they’re not what they seem. They’re just innocent gestures between good friends,’ was certainly an option. But all that it would have bought me was whatever time it took for Prim to confront Susie.

So I confessed. ‘No, I wasn’t. Things happened.’

I told her how it had all come about, after Susie’s near-calamity on the stairs. ‘She was frightened,’ I said. ‘She thought she’d been sleepwalking. So did I at that point; it was only afterwards that I realised what had really happened, that someone had broken in and thrown her down there.

‘So I stayed with her, till she settled down. I fell asleep and. . Like I said, things happened.’

‘Rubbish,’ Prim snarled. ‘Even if that far-fetched crap is true, which I doubt, it’s quite obvious to me what happened; the conniving little bitch thought you’d chuck her out if she just came on to you, so she staged a sham at the foot of the stairs.’

‘No!’ I protested. ‘When she went to bed she was too drunk to come on to anyone. I just dumped her on the bed and left her there. She didn’t stage anything. She had bruising on her arms where she’d been picked up and carried; not by me either, I promise you.’

‘Your promises are worth shit. These things that happened. . just the once, was it?’

‘No. It might have been, but things changed.’

‘Sure, things changed. You found that she was a good fuck, that’s what changed. Or did good old Oz feel sorry for her, and think that good old Prim wouldn’t mind her borrowing your services for the weekend?’

It was time to reach up my sleeve and produce my card. ‘There is no good old Oz,’ I shot back at her. ‘There never was, any more than there’s a good old Prim. We’re just a couple of yuppies with false glossy fronts.

‘You’ve lied to me since we’ve been here, Primavera. You gave me your version of your affair with Fortunato, but it wasn’t bloody true, was it?’

I saw the blood rush to her cheeks. ‘Who told you that? Susie?’

‘Susie thought that you’d told me. She went out of her way not to shop you, my dear. It doesn’t matter how I found out, you told me the opposite of the truth, didn’t you? You wanted to have the copper’s kid; it was Fortunato who wouldn’t hear of it. He did a runner back to his wife and set the abortion up without even asking you. What do you suppose he’d have done if you’d refused to go through with it?’

‘How could I,’ she exclaimed, ‘in those circumstances?’

‘The same way that many other women do. It would have been called a love child, I guess, and you’d have been called a single parent. Look around, you’ll see plenty of them.

‘But sure, your body, your decision, your right. So why did you lie to me? Know what I think? I reckon that when I turned up, just after it had happened, and when I found myself suddenly single again, you saw me as an easy option. But you were afraid that if I knew the truth, any part of it, I might have walked away.’

She started to yell something back at me, but I stopped her.

‘Does that sound conceited? Sorry, but tell me that I’ve got it wrong.’

She answered me with silence.

‘As it happens, I found out about it by accident, on Friday night. You must have been mad to think that I wouldn’t, eventually. Then I got a bit shifty, and I found out about Steve bloody Miller. You know what that led to; you’ve seen the damage.’