‘It’s not your flat,’ I said, blocking the door as she made a movement forward. I had to let her see that, if she wanted to get in, she was going to have to push past me. Either she or the gorilla with her would be capable of doing that, but my failure to fold in the face of her aggression threw her momentarily on to the back foot. ‘If it was your flat, you’d have a key,’ I went on.
She blinked. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s Mickey’s flat. But I’ve got a right to it and that little tart he keeps here certainly isn’t getting to keep it. It’s part of the settlement. My lawyer says so.’
Now I was the one thrown into confusion and could only hope my face didn’t show it. One thing was shockingly clear to me. This flat belonged to Allerton. He had decorated and furnished it as a bowerbird does its nest and installed Lisa, his mistress, in it. Mickey chose the white leather sofas and the provocative nude painting. Mickey relaxed here in the dragon dressing gown and kept his clothes in the built-in wardrobe. Mickey had paid for the unworn shoes and designer label dresses. If I hadn’t been so anxious to get out of the place, I would have worked that out for myself instantly and not had to have it signposted by this woman. A shiver ran up my spine. Mickey had bathed that morning in the bath and left the water and the damp towel. It might easily have been Mickey who had turned up here now and found me going through the place.
Lisa’s decision to bolt and leave Allerton now appeared in an entirely new and intimate light. This was a lot more than a dancer who’d got fed up with working in a seedy club. This was the end of an affair and a shared lifestyle. This was shouts and threats and tears and bruised emotions. This girl hadn’t just worked for Mickey. She had been sharing his bed and his life and in return he had given her everything she wanted. As a result, he had thought he owned her. Perhaps that was what had led to Lisa deciding to call an end to it. Mickey had become too possessive, perhaps jealous. More shoes and clothes than she could wear didn’t compensate for lack of all freedom. Nor, let’s face it, was Mickey the sort of boyfriend she could take home and introduce to Paul and Jennifer.
I sighed. Ganesh had said I hadn’t known what was going on and obviously I hadn’t. Mickey hadn’t been frank and neither had Lisa. If either of them had told me the truth I wouldn’t be here now. I’d have run a mile. I’d have tracked down Bonnie and kidnapped her from Harry’s wife and hidden us both away until the combatants in this lovers’ battle had concluded it. I had been a fool to imagine this whole thing was a business matter. It was as upfront and personal as it could get.
It was probably even more complicated. The woman hovering impatiently in the doorway had mentioned a lawyer. A sinking feeling made itself felt in my chest.
‘Who are you?’ I asked, guessing what the answer would be.
‘I’m Julie,’ she retorted, staring at me.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’m Fran. You don’t know who I am and I still don’t know who you are. If you think you’re coming in, you’re going to have to tell me. Even if this flat belongs to Mickey Allerton, Lisa has been living here.’
‘I know that!’ she snapped. ‘I’m Julie Allerton, Mickey’s wife.’
Oh, shit, I thought. She would be, wouldn’t she? Not just a discarded girlfriend but the legal trouble-and-strife. Never had rhyming slang appeared so apt.
‘Soon to be ex-wife,’ she added.
Double disaster.
‘And this is my friend, Donald.’ Julie concluded her introduction by waving a scarlet-tipped nail at the simian type beside her who still remained silent and stared at me as if I were part of the furniture.
‘Perhaps you’d better come in, then,’ I said.
She marched past me, Donald lumbering after. Julie paused and looked around her critically. Donald just stood there without any apparent interest in his surroundings.
‘I never furnished it like this,’ Julie said. ‘Mickey must have chosen it all or he got someone to do it for him. That little scrubber didn’t do it. I had it really lovely, you know, tasteful. Now it looks like a knocking shop. What’s he done with all my furniture and curtains and my beautiful white carpet? If he’s sold them off then he owes me the money. Bloody hell, to change it all and never one word to me!’ She turned to me and I got the critical look. ‘Do you work for my husband?’
‘Not at the club,’ I said. ‘I’m just running an errand for Lisa.’
‘I didn’t think you’d work at the club,’ she said dismissively.
Very rude, I thought. All right, I’m not the glamorous type, but there’s such a thing as tact.
She went to one of the sofas and sat down, crossing her legs and swinging her foot. She wore strappy sandals with very high heels and her toenails were painted to match her fingernails. The action indicated not so much nervousness as a pent-up frustration ready to burst out and wreak havoc. ‘Sit down, Donald,’ she ordered.
He shambled across and sat down beside her, hitching up his cream chinos to reveal white silk socks and flat white loafers. I wondered whether the look he was aiming for was nautical. I closed the flat door and took a seat on the opposite sofa facing the pair of them. We must have looked like three passengers in a train.
‘I’ve got an arrangement with Mrs Kovacs downstairs,’ Julie confided. She began to rummage in a capacious white leather bag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You smoke?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘I’d give up,’ she said, ‘if it wasn’t for the stress. I’ve had a lot of stress. Divorce isn’t easy and Mickey is being a real shit.’
Donald moved to pull a lighter from his blazer pocket and thumb it into flame. Julie leaned towards him and lit her cigarette. He put the lighter away without attempting to light up himself. Julie looked round her.
‘Got an ashtray in here?’
‘I’ll look in the kitchen,’ I said. It was strange, playing hostess to these two in this flat. I couldn’t see an ashtray in the kitchen but I found a saucer and brought that back, putting it on the glass coffee table.
‘Ta,’ she said and tapped out the already long column of ash.
‘Mrs Kovacs,’ I said, ‘would be the old lady who lives in the flat below this one.’
‘That’s right. She keeps an eye open for me. See, I know Mickey’s trying to diddle me over the divorce settlement. Well, I’m not having it!’ She nodded and blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.
I coughed meaningfully and waved it away.
‘Sorry, dear,’ she said attempting to dispel the fumes with a wave of her scarlet nails. ‘Well, old Ma Kovacs, she lets me know what goes on up here!’ Julie nodded. ‘Of course, I know anyway. I’m not daft. You know what? I’ve got it worked out and you can tell Mickey so if you see him. Or you can tell that Lisa so. She’s not having my flat. She’s not having anything of mine. Well,’ Julie reflected, scowling into the spiralling cigarette smoke, ‘she can have my husband and welcome to him, but she’s not having anything else.’
‘Mrs Kovacs,’ I said, sticking to my own line of conversation, ‘phoned you to let you know a stranger had turned up with the key of the flat and was up here.’
‘That’s it, dear. So Donald and I jumped in the car and came over from Hampstead. Didn’t we, Donald?’
Donald nodded silently.
Perhaps Julie noticed that I eyed Donald with a slightly puzzled look. At any rate, she felt she had to explain him. ‘Mickey himself might have turned up and I didn’t want to face him all on my own. I wanted, you know, moral support.’ She nodded at Donald.
Donald looked more like strong-arm support to me, but, either way, Julie had probably been prudent. The idea that Mickey might just walk in on the three of us was an unsettling one. But there was safety in numbers, if he did.
‘So,’ said Julie. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘This business of your divorce and whose flat this is and all the rest of it, it’s nothing to do with me, right? I didn’t even know Mickey Allerton was married.’
‘Well, he soon won’t be,’ said Julie crisply. ‘Where’s the bimbo?’
‘If you mean Lisa,’ I said, ‘she’s had to go and visit her family. Her father suffers very bad health and he’s in a wheelchair.’ Julie stared at me. ‘On the level,’ I said. ‘She asked me to pop in and check out the flat because she left in a hurry and she doesn’t know when she’ll be coming back.’
Julie stubbed out her cigarette and leaned towards me. ‘You can tell her from me that she’s not never coming back here, right? I’m getting in a locksmith tomorrow to change all the locks. My lawyer says I can.’
‘Like it’s nothing to do with me,’ I persisted.
Julie leaned back, arms folded, and surveyed me. ‘But you know my husband?’
‘We’ve met,’ I said.
‘She’s got him twisted round her little finger,’ Julie said.
Not to the point where he took it quietly when Lisa decided to end the affair. It was no use telling Julie that Lisa had had enough. She wouldn’t believe it and I couldn’t blame her, not with all that expensive schmutter in the dressing room. My mind was now running in a new direction. Mickey had invested heavily in this little love nest. He was trying to persuade the flown lovebird back into it. But if she really wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t come back, it might not end with only Ivo floating in the river. I’d read about crimes of passion. I had to get out of this whole thing.
‘You know the trouble with my husband?’ asked Julie conversationally as she lit another cigarette. A haze of blue smoke was beginning to fill the air between us and my eyelids itched. ‘You know why he’s got himself into this mess with that girl?’
‘He didn’t realise age difference mattered?’ I ventured since she seemed to expect an answer.
‘He’s not that old!’ she snapped. I realised she and Allerton were probably much of a generation and my implication that Mickey was verging on the elderly hadn’t gone down well. Studying her now I could see how the skin round her eyes was beginning to sag and her jaw was losing its firm line. She hadn’t yet resorted to plastic surgery but the day would come if she wanted to stay looking the way she did now. Even so, I thought with some sympathy, it wouldn’t do her any good. Mickey had already found a way to recapture his lost youth. Lisa had the key to this flat and the visitor didn’t.
‘Well, no,’ I said hastily. ‘And he’s looked after himself. He’s a very attractive man.’ I added, ‘Not my type! But I can see he would be for a lot of women. Still, it’s got to be twenty years between them.’
‘Age doesn’t matter,’ said Julie firmly. ‘Does it, Donald?’
Donald appeared surprised at this unexpected appeal to him for an opinion on matters of the heart. His bushy eyebrows shot up and he uttered a kind of grunt which could be interpreted any way you wanted.
‘Mickey’s problem,’ said Julie, ‘has always been that he’s a bit of a dreamer.’
Now I must have looked surprised because a dreamer wasn’t how I’d have described Allerton. A well-groomed thug who exacted value for every pound spent and didn’t like being crossed, yes. Wandering lonely as a cloud, no.
‘You can believe it.’ She gestured at me with the cigarette. ‘Now I give Mickey his due. He’s done well for himself. For a long time I could have said he’d done well for both of us because we were together then.’ Julie leaned forward and through gritted teeth uttered, ‘Twenty-four years. Next year I was looking forward to our silver wedding. I was planning a big bash. I won’t say Mickey had never let his fancy stray. But it was nothing that mattered, not until little Miss Plum-in-her-mouth turned up. What was a girl like that doing, asking for a job at the Silver Circle?’
‘She wanted to be a dancer,’ I said.
‘Then she’s as daft as he is,’ said Julie, sucking furiously on the weed. ‘You know what Mickey’s dad did for a living?’
‘No idea,’ I said faintly.
‘He worked for the council, environmental health they call it now. Rat-catcher in chief, that’s what he was. It was a respectable living, mind, and we’d all be worse off without rat-catchers, but Mickey, he wanted to be in charge of his own life. He didn’t want anyone telling him what to do and he wanted glamour. You don’t find any glamour down drains.’
I nodded agreement. It had occurred to me I should encourage her to unburden herself. Anything she told me about Mickey might prove useful. Know your enemy! ‘Go on,’ I invited.
She was more than willing. ‘When I met Mickey he was running a pub and all his family was real proud of him. Then he scraped enough together to stop working for the brewery and go independent. His mum told everyone her son was a successful businessman. So he was. But Mickey, he had dreams far, far beyond pulling pints. He turned the pub into a club. It was just a starting point. He sold up and moved on to something bigger and in a better location. Then he took on a second place. It was like everything he touched turned to, you know, gold. Like that bloke in the story.’