Never Tell (25 page)

Somehow I had known he would be there as I left Ash’s hotel room and walked out onto Charlotte Street.

‘Don’t make that joke about a bad penny, please,’ I said tiredly, but my heart was banging at the sight of him.

‘Not fond of jokes really, Rose,’ Danny said in his Scottish drawl. He was chewing a matchstick that he moved lazily to the other side of his mouth. ‘I thought you’d have known that by now.’

‘I just want
you
to know, I was invited this time.’

‘Aye, I do know.’ Danny yawned lightly and pulled his tobacco out of his pocket.

Something strong and painful filled my veins. Humiliation. Anger with myself. ‘Don’t you get bored of being their guard dog?’

‘It’s my job,’ he said, removing the match and rolling a cigarette. ‘Just doing my job, see, doll.’

‘Right,’ I said. I looked up at him, into those inscrutable blue eyes. ‘And how do you square this with yourself?’

‘What?’

‘The violence up at Albion Manor, the heavies, beating people up – men who die, for Christ’s sake – guns, the drug-addicted daughter – shall I go on?’

‘Please don’t.’

‘But, Danny—’

He put a finger on my lips to silence me. ‘I sleep easily enough, Rose,’ he said quietly, and then he just started whistling – right into my face. A taxi pulled up in front of us and a stunning girl in a leather coat got out. He watched her impassively, shrugging down into his parka as he lit the roll-up.

I felt a curious stab of something in my gut. ‘Could you … ?’ I faltered. Our eyes met.

‘Could I what?’ He resumed the whistling.

I could see the freckles on the bridge of his nose. I suddenly wanted to punch him square on it. ‘Could you not whistle in my face, please?’

He just winked at me. I shouldered my bag, making my way down the front steps to the street to the tune of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, gritting my teeth. Then it stopped.

‘Rose,’ he called after me softly.

I turned back. ‘Yes?’

The smoke from his cigarette was a haze between us. ‘Remember what I said. Go home.’

Flushing furiously, I walked towards Tottenham Court Road and the car park. I’d be damned if I’d let them all tell me what to do. And I knew one person who might be able to help me reveal the secret I couldn’t work out. It seemed I wasn’t going home quite yet.

I had half an hour to get to the cuttings office, Cutting Out, before it closed for the day. Naturally I got stuck behind a pathetic procession of anaemic-looking Hare Krishnas banging their drums and ringing their bells down Euston Road. Then a police van screeched past us and blocked off the turning to Camden.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I muttered, trying to reverse. A surly cab driver was refusing to budge and I was about to get wedged in.

In dirty Kilburn I parked the car on a meter and ran up the road. I found a shop and bought a packet of Bourbon biscuits and a bottle of Pernod. Then I jogged down the stairs to the basement door of the town-house.

‘Please,’ I buzzed the door, ‘please, it’s Rose Langton. I used to work for Xavier Smith.’

‘I’m shut,’ a disembodied voice said. ‘Go away.’

‘Please, Peggy. It’s so important. I wouldn’t bother you, but this one’s a winner. I swear.’

She opened the door a crack. I shoved the Pernod round it.

‘And I’ve got biscuits,’ I said, placatingly.

‘And hard cash?’

‘And hard cash.’

Muttering, she let me in. She was more blind than the last time I’d been here, and her glasses were milk-bottle thick, magnifying her grey eyes alarmingly.

‘Remember me, Peggy?’ I smiled as I pressed the Bourbons on her too. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while.’

‘They all come back,’ she said, seeming both cross and triumphant. The smell of cats in the warm basement was ferocious. ‘They realise the damned computer won’t reveal everything like some damned crystal ball, and they come sloping back.’

‘Of course they do,’ I soothed. ‘How else would we get to the bottom of things?’

‘No need to butter me up, my girl,’ she sniffed, but a small smile played round her wrinkled old mouth. Her lipstick was a startling orange. ‘I’m making chai. Want some?’

‘Love some.’ It would be undrinkable but worth it. ‘Thank you.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for anything you’ve got on a man called Hadi Kattan.’ I headed to the end of the room that housed the 1990s through to the seventies. ‘Hadi, Ash and Maya Kattan – do those names ring any bells? London society pages, Iranian and possibly Saudi connections.’

‘Not off the top of my head.’ She put the Pernod on a shelf and pulled open a drawer. ‘But look in there. If it’s not in there, it didn’t happen.’

‘And I was also looking for a girl called Huriyyah something. Possibly the same family. Probable Oxford connection. I don’t know her surname, though.’

The kettle was whistling as I went through file after file, my hands shaking. I cut my finger on a piece of paper. Eventually I found Hadi Kattan. There was a piece on his rumoured involvement with the Iranian Secret Service, MOIS or VEVAK, from 1989 but it was largely unsubstantiated.

And then finally, I came across what I was looking for.

A picture of Hadi’s wife, Alia, from the late eighties. Her photo stared out at me; a picture of the two of them at a polo match at the Royal Berkshire Polo Club. She looked a lot like Maya. And she wasn’t who I’d feared; she looked nothing like Huriyyah. Of course she didn’t – Huriyyah was far too young to have been Ash or Maya’s mother. I felt a rush of relief. I didn’t recognise her: thank God, I’d been wrong.

And then another cutting, much earlier, from
Tatler
, 1972, preserved in a plastic sleeve. Alia was so young, pregnant, beautiful and glowing in an ice-cream-coloured dress. I looked again at the photo. Behind the elegant couple stood a tall imposing man. Lord Higham. Was it my imagination – I craned forward in the harsh light of Peggy’s basement – or was Higham’s hand almost clasping Alia’s?

Silently Peggy passed me one last file. A small article about an oil company, a subsidiary of Shell, franchised by an Iranian-based conglomerate. There was a small photo of two men shaking hands at a do in Kuwait.

‘I always suspected that Higham was not to be trusted,’ she sniffed, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘His own agenda and all that. The posh ones are never much good.’

‘British Government steps into oil crisis: Allies for the good of British industry,’ the headline said.

Beneath it, a few lines about how the pair were allies not just on the polo field, but also in politics and oil.

I looked closer. Higham and Kattan, shaking hands over a huge vase of lilies.

Ghosts whom I thought had been at peace were back walking the earth – images I’d buried after university back in the forefront of my mind. For the first time in a while, I found myself craving a drink.

Standing beneath the sprawling sycamore outside Peggy’s house, I called my dearest friend.

‘Take me for a cocktail? No work talk, I promise. No pressure.’

He took me to his club in Shoreditch. It was full of young girls in long T-shirts and leggings, and men who’d snorted too much cocaine and talked too loudly about it.

We didn’t discuss work. We talked about him, about his constant exhaustion at the moment. And then we ended up on the subject of my marriage. Hardly the lesser of two evils.

‘What’s going on, Rose?’ Xavier sipped his martini. ‘You seem – distracted.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was defensive.

‘Distracted by your life. By it not being what it should be.’

‘That’s you talking, Xav, not me.’

‘You had so much promise, darling.’ He looked positively maudlin. I could see the grey in his cropped hair.

‘Christ, Xavier,’ I pushed my straw very hard into the tiny shards of ice at the bottom of my glass, ‘you sound like my obituary or something.’

‘I meant I didn’t think you’d plump for this.’

‘For what?’ I felt horribly raw and defensive. ‘Three beautiful children and a million-pound house in the Cotswolds?’

‘Oh, do me a favour, Rose. You were never about the money. You were about the ambition, the story and the …’ He was distracted by a beautiful mixed-race boy in jeans so low-slung the shadow of his arse was visible. ‘The kill.’

‘I’m really happy being home with my children, thank you.’ It was true – most of the time. ‘What you mean, Xavier, what you really mean is – you don’t like James.’

‘You said it, darling, not me.’

‘You might as well have done.’

‘And you married him, not me. Thank God.’

There was a long pause.

‘You know why I married him,’ I said quietly.

‘But it’s not enough, is it, Rose? It’s not enough being his nursemaid.’

‘I’m not.’ I was furious.

‘Or, dare I say it, darling—’

I held a hand up in protestation. ‘So
don’t
say it, Xavier.’

‘His mummy.’ He ignored me, stretching with nonchalance, looking out at the high-rises that encroached on us. Canary Wharf blinked blindly.

‘Shut up! James is a good father,’
when he feels like being
, ‘and he’s very talented. He’s passionate about his work. He’s made some brilliant music.’

‘If you like that sort of thing. But does he love you?’ Xav removed something from his back teeth with great delicacy. ‘I mean, really love you? Like you deserve to be loved?’

‘Don’t mince your words will you, Xavier? Christ, it’s not
Brief
bloody
Encounter
or something. It’s real life.’

‘I’m nothing if not a mincer, darling, you know that. So why do you stay with him?’

‘Because.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I want to give my kids a chance. Because I want them to have what I had.’

‘Which was … ?’

‘A stable home,’ I said rather helplessly. ‘A normal loving home. Parents who liked each other.’

‘Rose,’ he said gently, ‘you can’t fake that type of thing.’

‘I’m not.’

But we both knew I was lying. ‘I think I’ll have another one.’ I drained my drink.

‘That bad, eh?’ He waved at the waitress. ‘I just worry that your dear husband’s the kind of arsehole who hangs out here with his baseball cap on backwards aged forty, boasting to a couple of tarts half his age that he once took an E with the Chemical Brothers and stayed up till Wednesday.’

‘So what kind of arsehole are you, Xav?’

‘The kind who can’t resist one,’ he drawled. ‘Excuse me one moment.’ He slid off in the direction of the boy.

I checked my phone again. Nothing. Funny how suddenly I was wedded to this bit of plastic. Like it was my lifeline.

Xav slid back.

‘Blimey, that was quick,’ I marvelled. ‘You didn’t just—’

‘What do you take me for, Rose?’ He lowered his lashes. ‘Even I’m not that swift.’

My phone bleeped. I read the message; my hand shook a little.

‘Who’s that?’ Xav narrowed his eyes. ‘Rose Langton. I recognise that look.’

‘No one,’ I said, but I was blushing. I found it oddly comforting that he knew me so well.

‘Rose,’ he sighed. ‘For Christ’s sake, be careful. You don’t need to get hurt now.’

It was late, it was dark, London throbbed around me. Full up with adrenalin and nerves, I left the club.

The moon was full, but the dim little street near Paddington Station was too narrow to absorb its light. A hanging-basket full of dead geraniums hung by the peeling front door of the B &B, half a bicycle with no seat chained to the railing. Somewhere inside, a couple argued in an African dialect, Yoruba perhaps, their voices floating out angrily from the ground floor, the smell of curry and rotten bins mixing in the chill spring night. I paused, unsure whether this was the right place. And then I heard a low tuneful whistle. ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean … ‘

The front door was open. I ran up the stairs.

He was lying fully clothed on the small double bed, on top of the candlewick bedspread, smoking, the ashtray on his chest, the only light in the room the streetlamp outside. I stood nervously at the door, my back pressed tightly against it.

The net curtain blew in the breeze from the half-open window, and I shivered in the chill. I was frightened. I didn’t remember ever feeling like this before. Happiness; excitement, perhaps. No, not so pure as happiness. Absolute anticipation.

‘Why are you over there and I’m over here?’ he asked, stubbing out his cigarette. I walked to the bed, and looked down at him. At his thick tousled hair, at the sharp freckled nose, the veiled eyes, the blue dulled by the dim room. The blue I kept falling into time and again.

I wavered there above him, unsure – and then he sat up, put out a hand.

I’d forgotten what it was to be wanted.

He pulled me down to him. ‘Rose,’ he murmured into my hair and I breathed him in. The grotty room, the noise from the street, the sirens in the distance faded until there was just us. Us – and time.

He pushed back my shirt and put his lips against my collarbone. Never enough time, I thought, dazed, and then I stopped thinking.

Afterwards.

I slept for a while. When I woke, he was watching me, and I smiled, suddenly shy, pulled the sheet up around me self-consciously. We gazed at each other, the street-light dimly orange behind the nets.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ I said. ‘It’s really odd.’

He rolled over and away from me. ‘There’s nothing
to
know.’ He sloshed whisky from a half-bottle into a stack of plastic cups with Mickey Mouse on the side, and handed the top one to me.

‘I’d like to know
something.’
I sat up a bit. ‘Where do you live, where do you come from, why do you do this strange job?’

I wanted him to say something that made it all right; that made what he did acceptable in my eyes.

‘You don’t need to know, Rose.’ He stared at me and I could see myself reflected in his eyes. ‘Really. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, and I’d rather not share them.’

‘All right.’

There was a pause.

‘I don’t normally behave like this,’ I said eventually, sipping at the whisky. ‘I’m not – this is the first time – I mean—’ I choked on the fiery liquid.