‘King Midas,’ I said. ‘It ends badly, that story.’
‘So does this one. No matter how well things were going, Mickey wanted to do better. The thing that triggered all the trouble, as I see it, was when he bought the villa.’
My mind was running ahead of her now. ‘In Spain?’ I guessed.
She nodded. ‘It’s a lovely place, Fran. It’s got a kidney-shaped swimming pool.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘You bet it is!’ she retorted. ‘But we started mixing with a different set of people and Mickey, he started to get really big ideas. He wants to open up this really posh nightclub in Spain, the sort of place where you get stars to come and sing for the punters. All upmarket décor and no week-in-the-sun holidaymakers but the real high rollers. “Mick,” I said to him. “Stick to what you know.” He wouldn’t listen to me. But it was good advice, wasn’t it, Donald?’
Donald grunted again. I wondered if he could speak.
‘Then along comes Miss Lisa, all nicely spoken and easy on the eye, a bit of real quality totty. And Mickey loses any common sense he ever had just like that, overnight. I’m out: she’s in. We’d bought this flat as an investment because there’s good money to be made renting out furnished accommodation around here. But then Mickey pinched the keys and moved Miss Lisa in. I might, just might, have put up with that if I’d thought it was temporary. Mickey’s at a funny age for a man. They do silly things. I don’t mean you, Donald.’ She patted his knee.
Donald looked alarmed at this intimacy and then puzzled as if he wasn’t sure he was being paid a compliment or insulted.
Julie took up her tale. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no, Mickey thinks he’s going to sell up here and move out to Spain, taking her with him. They’ll live in the villa and open up this big fancy club and run it together.’ Julie bared her teeth in what was intended for a smile. ‘Over my dead body,’ she said.
Now I didn’t like to point out to her that it might come to just that. She knew Mickey better than I did. But he’d been married to the woman for twenty-four years and he’d probably realised it wouldn’t be easy walking out. She wouldn’t settle without a fight. It was ironic, really. He couldn’t get rid of Julie and he couldn’t keep Lisa. I found it sad. Julie wasn’t sad or, if she had been, she’d got over it. Now she was out for everything she could salvage from the wreck of her marriage. That was all that mattered to her.
‘Oh, I’m a realist,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t stop him doing it. He’ll come to grief but that’s his problem. Mine is getting what’s owing to me for twenty-four years’ loyalty. That’s why I’m getting a divorce. I’m getting a court to tell him what’s due to me. He can argue with me but he can’t argue with a court, right?’
‘Right,’ I said faintly. ‘I see your point. After so long together . . .’
She surged on. ‘Do you know? We lived above that pub when we were first married. We were childhood sweet-hearts, you know that?’ She fired the question at me.
I shook my head.
‘No, of course you don’t,’ said Julie suddenly sounding lachrymose. ‘But we were. I was eighteen when we got married and he was twenty-two. Only a couple of kids really but we were as happy as larks. The only furniture we had was bits and pieces our families gave us or we got from second-hand shops. But from the start Mickey was full of ideas how he would make it big-time and we would both be living in luxury. He did it, too. And we were still happy even though we didn’t have any children. Funny, you always think you’ll have your own kids. But it didn’t happen for Mickey and me. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me. I would’ve liked a baby, but Mickey said, it didn’t matter, we had each other.’
Merry hell. I’d be in tears if she kept on like this.
Luckily Julie reverted to her aggressive mode. ‘Now not only he doesn’t want me, he wants to cheat me out of this flat and anything else he can stop me getting. He says I can have the house in Hampstead. Big deal. He knows I’m living there and he’d have a devil of a job getting me out of it. But trust Mickey, he found a way to turn even that to his advantage. “You’re getting that big house,” he says, “and it’s worth a good bit, so I don’t have to give you any more. Fair’s fair,” he had the nerve to say. “You get the house, I get the rest.” ’
She spluttered to a halt, took a deep breath and began again. ‘Fair? The bastard doesn’t know the meaning of the word! I gave him the best years of my life. I could tell him, he’s not the only one who isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair! Men, they mature like a good wine, eh? A woman . . .’ She broke off again and cast a slightly nervous glance at Donald. But he sat there looking so blank it was difficult to tell if he was even listening. He’d probably heard it all before, anyway.
She turned practical. ‘I realise I won’t get the villa in Spain and there’s not much I can do about that. But I’m having this flat as part of my divorce settlement. After all, if Mickey sells both clubs he’ll be pretty well set up and I don’t suppose I’ll see any of the money because he’ll spirit it abroad. Mickey’s good at doing that. So I should have the two residential properties in this country. That’s only fair, isn’t it?’ she appealed to me. ‘My lawyer says it is. I worked for years in the pub behind the bar for nothing and I worked as receptionist in the first club for a couple of years until Mickey reckoned now we’d moved house to a swankier area, it wouldn’t do for me to work in a club. I had to be, you know, a proper lady and stay home going to coffee mornings and making friends with the sort of people Mickey wanted us to be thick with. I worked hard at that, too. I chatted up the wives and then Mickey got to meet the husbands. Everything I’ve done in my whole life,’ she concluded passionately, ‘I’ve done for Mickey Allerton! Stupid, that’s what I was. Well, I’ve stopped being stupid now! You can tell him that from me.’
I thought about all those unhappy letters to the agony aunt I’d read in Beryl’s woman’s magazine. When the worm turns, it does so with a vengeance.
‘Julie,’ I said placatingly, ‘I don’t know anything about divorce. But perhaps you ought not to do anything rash. You and Mickey should sit down and talk it over in a week or two. The situation might have changed by then.’
‘You don’t sit and talk things over with my husband,’ said Julie bitterly. ‘Mickey doesn’t worry about other people’s feelings. He doesn’t discuss things. He makes up his mind and that’s it.’
‘He might not go to Spain with Lisa,’ I ventured, wondering how far I could go.
Julie shrugged. ‘Whether they go or stay, I hope she takes him for every penny, but not every penny that belongs to me.’ She squashed out the remains of her cigarette and stood up. ‘Well, let’s take a look around, since we’re all here.’
‘You look,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving.’
But Julie had pulled open the door to the dressing room. ‘Strewth!’ we heard her exclaim. There was a silence, broken only by the rustle of cloth. She was rummaging along the dress rack. Then she came out, her face set white and furious, and marched past both Donald and me, without a word, into the kitchen. There was the sound of a drawer being dragged open, a clatter, and she came out holding a wicked-looking knife.
I scurried behind Donald but it wasn’t me she was after. She went back into the dressing room and the ensuing tearing and ripping sounds indicated she was busy shredding all that designer wear into tatters. In between her efforts we could hear her muttering to herself, ‘Little bitch! You won’t wear that again! Look at this! Must have cost a couple of grand! Well, you’ll be able to use it for dusters now, Miss Lisa!’
‘Donald,’ I whispered, edging out from behind the sofa. ‘Don’t you think you ought to stop her? Isn’t it criminal damage or something?’
Donald, still relaxed on the sofa without any sign of being about to move, proved he could speak.
‘You don’t never argue,’ he wheezed, ‘with a woman holding a ruddy great carving knife.’
Fair enough. I tiptoed out of the flat, leaving Julie to it.
Chapter Ten
‘Do you know what?’ I asked my audience at large. ‘I thought Mickey Allerton was older, well into his fifties. But if Julie’s telling the truth, he’s not more than forty-six. He looks pretty good, mind you, but still at least ten years older than he is.’
My listeners consisted of Ganesh, his sister Usha, her husband Jay and - ostensibly busy in the background with a stack of invoices - Uncle Hari. We were all gathered in Hari’s flat over the shop and, for the most part, sitting in near darkness. Hari had an old-fashioned green-shaded reading light on the desk where he was working. It cast a white glare on the paperwork and virtually no light anywhere else. The rest of us had to make do with sulphur-yellow street lighting seeping through the chink in the window curtains and the glow from the flickering television.
Originally we were bathed in the dim radiance of the dusty chandelier in the middle of the ceiling directly above our heads. It held three forty-watt candle bulbs in glass bowls filled with dead flies. But we had been denied even this when Hari had pointed out that if we were watching television we didn’t need it, and had we any idea of the size of his electricity bill? So we switched off the light and sat in the gloom, even though none of us was taking much notice of the television, thus effectively getting the worst of both worlds. The telly offering was a long drawn-out whodunnit in which the detective appeared to have so many personal problems to deal with I wasn’t surprised it was taking him so long to work out who did the murder.
Jay and Usha did not appear to mind either sitting in the near-dark or the rubbish on the television as they were far more interested in my adventures. Usha was particularly keen to hear the details of the Allertons’ marital difficulties. Ganesh, having heard my story before, sat mutinously introspective with his arms folded, glowering at the turgid police drama as the detective struggled through yet another row with his wife or female colleague or some woman or other. On telly or in real life, you couldn’t escape the battle of the sexes. But I had a feeling that, in his mind, Ganesh had substituted Uncle Hari for the victim in the screen story.
‘Living the sort of life he’s led,’ opined Jay in reply to my observation, ‘I’m not surprised Allerton looks older than he is.’
I’ve always got on well with Usha. I like Jay too although he can be a bit pompous. He was squeezed next to his wife on the old sofa and I wondered, when the time came for them to leave, how they were going to extricate themselves. Usha’s baby appeared to be due at any moment; she was enormous. Jay had also put on some weight, perhaps in sympathy, and was quite a bit podgier than when I’d last met him. He looked every inch the successful accountant. Even in the dim light, I could see Ganesh kept giving him funny looks, partly wistful, partly envious and partly cross.
‘It is a great mistake to do business with such people!’ declared Hari, tapping madly into a pocket calculator. Hari has excellent hearing. It’s always a mistake to think he’s not listening.
‘I didn’t do business with him by choice,’ I reminded him. ‘He’s - or he was - holding Bonnie.’
‘He doesn’t have your dog now,’ said Jay tactlessly. ‘You are no longer under any obligation to him.’
Usha dug her husband in the ribs. ‘We’re really sorry about your dog being lost, Fran. I expect she will turn up.’
‘Everyone’s looking,’ I said. ‘I hope she’ll find her way home but I want to be there when she does. I’ll have to go to Oxford first thing tomorrow morning to give Lisa the passport. Then I’ll consider I’ve done my bit and I’ll come back to London and concentrate on finding my dog.’
‘I’m coming with you to Oxford,’ said Ganesh in a loud firm voice.
No one looked at him. We all looked at Uncle Hari, who dropped his pocket calculator and rose to his feet.
‘No argument, Uncle,’ said Ganesh. ‘I’ve not had any time off for ages.’
‘Tomorrow it will be very difficult!’ protested Hari. ‘Who will go to see the suppliers?’
‘It’s an emergency!’ insisted Ganesh.
Hari gestured wildly, sat down and picked up his calculator. I fancied he hadn’t given way but was just waiting until he got Ganesh on his own to argue it out.
‘I think it’s a good idea for Ganesh to go with Fran,’ said Usha loyally. Ganesh was her little brother and she still stood up for him in any scrap. ‘She shouldn’t be on her own. There’s a killer loose out there in Oxford.’
‘A killer?’ yelled Hari, leaping to his feet and sending the pocket calculator flying. ‘No one should go to Oxford, no one! Not you, Francesca, and not Ganesh. Most certainly not Ganesh. It would be most irresponsible.’
‘There might not be a killer, Mr Patel,’ I said as soothingly as I could. ‘Perhaps Ivo just tripped and fell in the river.’
‘One should not leap to conclusions,’ declared Jay. ‘I dare say this was an accident, you know. Just as Fran said, the fellow was jogging by the river, slipped and fell in. Possibly he could not swim. Not everyone can swim,’ he added a touch self-consciously.