Sugarcoated (12 page)

Get real. You don’t know the slapped guy was saying ‘Claudia’! Loads of names begin like yours: Clare, Clementine, Chloe, Cleopatra, Claudette, Clareeeeeessssss …

And you don’t know he’d been slapped either.

Could’ve been Dave Griffen’s mates. Messing.

You barely know the guy, after all.

And you
definitely
don’t know it was his proper number you rang.

He could’ve stuck a wrong digit into your moby.

Slip of the finger. It happens.

So bet you
did
ring a wrong number. Like the angry man said.

And there are loads of reasons why it’s dead every time you ring back …

‘So please, please,
please
go to sleep now.’

Seven hours of non-stop tossing and turning after I
went to bed, I was still pleading with myself. Still trying to shut down my thoughts. Although, since I wanted to beat the rush for an emergency dental appointment, it was time to get up.

Like an annoying kid brother you don’t want anywhere near your bedroom, daylight was creeping under the curtains already, and I hadn’t slept a wink. Despite tossing back a neat whisky (
Note to self: Dad’s wrong: A medicinal wonder my arse! Does it hell knock you out
) and stuffing a wodge of clove-soaked cotton wool in my poor tooth, it had throbbed all night. So had my brain. It niggled and needled me over that accidental call I might have made to Dave Griffen’s mobile.

If it even was his mobile in the first place …

‘Oh, don’t start. Forget it.’ I hauled myself out of bed, queasy from the bitter sweetness of clove-tinged whisky furring my tongue. The inside of my skull felt like moosh.

‘The crappest night,’ I spluttered under the shower, wincing when water scalded the exposed nerves in my tooth. Great, the pain reminded me: a crappier few hours ahoy.

But no Mussolini essay today. There was something. Another school skive! I only realised this when my dentist’s receptionist told me to expect a fair wait till I could be seen. Pain or no pain, that cheered me up instantly! Settling into the comfiest-looking chair in the waiting room, I almost chuckled. This was despite regular reminders of impending torture from the duelling drills whirring up and down the pain octave in surgeries beyond the walls. I searched through my dentist’s out-of-date pile for the mag with least writing and the most pictures. To keep calm I made a mental list of the treats I’d lavish on myself if I behaved during Open Wide Time and didn’t, as on my last visit, bite Mr
This Won’t Hurt
while he was numbing my mouth. Drilled and filled, I’d have an afternoon of convalescence; little nap perhaps. A DVD. A Chinese
. And who knows,
I promised myself,
there might be a call from
–

‘Stefan?!?’

OH MY GOD! When I saw what I saw in the Scottish
celeb mag I was flicking … Or rather when I saw
who
I saw, I yelped so loud the receptionist burst into the waiting room. ‘All right, Claudia?’

‘Just my tooth. Aw!’ I lied, although the photograph I was staring at was worse for my nerves than root canal treatment without pain relief.

There was my sweet-talking guy. Stefan … Only not exactly as I knew him. He was posing in a line-up of Premier Division footballers and their WAGS and STV newsreaders and weathergirls in their gladrags. He was all Jay Gatsby spivved in a white tuxedo. Slicked back hair. He’d his left arm slung over a blonde, his right circling the waist of a wasted-looking redhead. Gorgeous she was though: small-boned, creamy skinned. About half the width and height of me. Stefan had her pulled very close to him. Hip to hip they were, his eyes laughing into hers.

Or
was
it Stefan in the picture?

Was
it?

I stared and stared, doing all I could to convince myself: Nah. But the harder I stared, the trickier it became to deny it was anyone else.

Even though the information on the photograph’s caption was wrong:

Glasgow promoter Mr Joe and mystery companions celebrate the opening of Shocking! Scotland’s exclusive members’ only nightclub.

He’s not a promoter. And he’s not called Joe …

‘That can’t be Stefan,’ I tried to reassure myself yet again. But unless Stefan had an identical twin, who was I kidding? There was
my
Stefan’s smile. His dimples. I could even see the head of that snake tattooed on his wrist. It peeked beneath the cuff of the hand draping the breast of the blonde.

A couple of hours later, when my dentist whipped off his safety glasses, bared his perfect teeth at me and said, ‘I’d to dig right down to New Zealand for the root of
that
one,’ it didn’t twig that I’d lost a tooth. Not until he rattled a plastic jar at me. ‘Give that whopper to your boyfriend to wear round his neck as a love-token,’ he chuckled at me. When I didn’t laugh back he frowned.

‘Sore? Or still numb?’

I shook my head.
Both. Very,
was the truth. Though the way I was feeling had nothing to do with the dentist. NO. My
real
pain started when I set eyes on that photograph. Now it was twisting my guts, leaving me way more distressed than last night’s toothache.

Thought you weren’t really one for the ladies, so what’s the deal here? And you told me you’d no girlfriend. So who are your mystery companions? And I thought you were a student. Helping run your dad’s business. How come you’re posing for the High Life pages? Using a different name?

These puzzles tormented me all the way home. I’d walk a few steps. Stop.

Unfold the page I’d ripped from the magazine.

Who are you?
I kept asking the smoothie guy in the tuxedo, wanting him to look me in the eye and give me some answers.
‘And who’s
she
?
’

A fix of chocolate might console me, I decided, but d’you know what?

Standing in the nearest newsagent’s, swithering between a Mars Bar or a Topic, I realised that even the pleasure of eating chocolate would never be the same
again. Thanks very much, Stefan. As for Minstrels, I’d never eat another. Couldn’t even bear to look at the shiny brown packets of my favourite sweeties of all time. Alas and alack, the very sight of them time-travelled me to a different newsagent’s where a guy in a suede jacket appeared beside me out of nowhere and spoke in my ear, and his fingers brushed mine and we talked and he asked me out and everything seemed to be just …

Too good to be true.
I grabbed a box of Maltesers. Handed the newsagent a fiver.
You hardly knew the guy anyway,
I told myself.
He was just there. Never did find out why.

Waiting for my change it dawned on me that I’d never even winkled out Stefan’s business in Green-wood Shopping Centre. Despite him being so
totally
out of place. And more totally
not
the kind of guy to chat me up.
So why were you there?

Because my thoughts were preoccupied with the kind of questions any half-decent telly sleuth would ask herself, and my sleepless night was making me more clumsy than normal, I managed to drop all the
change the shop assistant was handing me. Coins scattered over the newspapers piled on the counter, rolled down spaces between them.

‘Sorry, sorry.’

The newsagent tutted at my apology. Attended to the queue behind me while I scrabbled for my change. I’d never have seen the second photograph of someone I recognised otherwise. Nearly missed it as it was. Because it was just a little one. Head and shoulders shot. My fifty-pence piece covered it.

But there was no mistaking Dave Griffen’s face. He was smiling out, right into my eyes, from the cover of the
Evening Times
:

I might know something.

For the umpteenth time since I read the article about poor Dave Griffen –

I saw him recently.

I rang his mobile last night.

Someone else answered.

Does that make me a missing link?

– my hand went to the kitchen phone. Dialled the Police Incident Hotline number from the paper. But quit dialling before the call connected.
You don’t know anything for sure. You’re always getting stuff wrong.

Must have gone through the same rigmarole a million times since I blundered home from the news-agent, punch drunk from reading how someone I knew –
Dave … who gave me his number … Christ … this is just like something that happens on the telly
…

With my gum tender and raw now the anaesthetic jag had worn off, I couldn’t think past my own pain and shock to figure the right thing to do.

So down went the receiver. Into the Maltesers delved my hand. Comfort. Comfort. Comfort.

Back to the
Evening Times
went my attention, sticky fingers flicking from Dave Griffen’s photo to the black and white reality of the horrible
horrible
thing that had happened to him.

Was
still
happening to him.

A great big guy like that. Smart. Fit. Hacked down.

Coma. Broken bones. Blunt weapon.

And his mum, sitting by his bedside. Waiting for him to wake up …

I groaned aloud every time I thought about that. Sick to my stomach. OK, too many Maltesers can do that, but to be honest my queasiness started well before I tore into the box I’d bought. And the reason my stomach was churning and cramping and threatening to empty itself from both ends at once had nothing to do with over-indulgence. No. My conscience was poking it, my guts reacting to a truth that my heart didn’t want to face:

You
saw Dave Griffen.

You
ARE
a missing link.

You should be coming forward.

Admit how close you’ve been to the poor guy. Literally.

Yeah. You were with Dave Griffen. There when Stefan – your ‘boyfriend’ by the way, Clod – pinned him to the wall and …
pinned him to the wall
and … Clod. You were there when Stefan warned Dave Griffen he was a psychopath.
’

There was a second missing link to Dave Griffen.

I was trying not to see it:

‘Stefan?’

My whisper tasted sour as I unscrumpled the page I’d nicked from the dentist’s. Spread it open next to the
Evening Times.

‘
Do you know who I am?
’ I recalled the grinning, white-tuxedoed smoothie guy in the photograph asking Dave Griffen.

Totally in his face.

Totally menacing:

‘D’you know you’re lucky to be walking out of here?’

My
date
had used those very words to someone whose legs were now broken. Who was possibly brain damaged.

The coincidence – a terrible coincidence – was trying to process itself: Was there any connection between Stefan’s threat and Dave Griffen’s condition now? Shouldn’t I be telling the police my suspicions?

Shouldn’t I have told them already?

Please come forward. Any little detail. However small.
You were always being invited to do that on
Crimewatch.

‘Better,’ I mumbled, hand hovering over the phone again.

But Stefan’s photograph stopped me in my tracks. His warm smile. Those dimples. So cute. So decent to me. Even if I wasn’t the only female in his life.

He’d be my
ex
-boyfriend if I grassed him up to the police. Sure as I was never going to win
Mastermind
or Miss World he’d be my ex. Forever.

For something he’s probably nothing to do with anyway …

The longer I stared at Stefan’s photograph, honestly, the less I could ever
imagine
his lips coming out with something as nasty as ‘
Do you know who I am?
’ I wondered if I’d misheard what he’d murmured to Dave Griffen. Wasn’t Claudia Cloth-Ears the nickname my toad maths teacher liked to use? Didn’t I get the wrong end of the stick
all
the time?

Yeah, and if he did blurt that psychopath stuff, I bet it was just hot air. Bragging. Blokes are like that
…

I nearly convinced myself, remembering how, outside Strut, Stefan had apologised for coming the hard man in front of me. Down on hands and knees. Persuading me he wasn’t really the cruel bastard I’d just seen him being …

But the spasm in my gut betrayed what I was really
thinking. The Deep Truth, as Georgina would have called it.

Clod
, in my head I could hear her: The Voice of Reason. I could even imagine her hand on my wrist. Shaking me lightly,
Pay attention to your gut reaction
.

That’s what she’d shrug. End of story. And if I quibbled with her: G,
I think I’m putting two and two together here to get three,
she’d wave the flat of her palm at me.

Clod, you know it’s not up to you to decide who’s a missing link or not. Just Do the Right Thing: tell the police you met Dave Griffen. And you better mention Stefan turning all Robert de Niro in Strut while you’re at it. Plus your phone call to Dave Griffen’s mobile. The shouty man. The slapping noises … The cops can check if you dialled the right number. And, Clod
– Here would be Georgina’s most emphatic piece of advice –
No offence, but see before you phone anyone, scribble down what you say. Then you won’t go tongue-tied and stammery. In fact, hey! I’ve a brilliant idea
…