Neurotica (15 page)

Anna immediately confessed her doubts about Quasimodo. She
said that for all Reenie knew he could be some homicidal
maniac taking a correspondence course in garotting studies. Reenie,
whose concerns were centered entirely on the substantial amount
of folding money she raked in each time she set up a meeting between
two clients, went in search of her sincere, reassuring voice,
and found it in a trice.

“You ab-so-lutely must not worry, my deeah. Ay vet all
my clients person'ly. 'Ee does 'ave a somewhat idiosyncratic
sense of humor, I admit. I keep telling 'im it puts the ladies
off, but he refuses to listen.

“Look, Ay shouldn't be revealing this so early on without
having obtained his say-so, but he is actually a medical
gentleman. As a matter of fact, he's a Harley Street
consultant.”

Anna's first thought on receiving this information was
that if she agreed to meet him, she would at least know to address
him as Mr. Modo and not Dr. Modo.

Her second thought was entirely sexual. She had always
half believed that because doctors knew so much about human
anatomy it followed that they had to be brilliant in the sack.
She'd never told a soul, not even Brenda, that the majority of
her sexual fantasies involved groups of wondrously handsome
male doctors in white coats undressing her, strapping her onto
an examination couch, forcing her legs into stirrups and taking
it in turns to do unspeakably perverted things to her with their
speculums.

She knew that this was a particularly outrageous fantasy,
not because it was depraved, but because in her experience most
medics were imperious, bombastic idiots, whose Godlike position
in society rested almost solely on having got an A in A-level
chemistry, who lacked both humor and compassion and whose sex
appeal would barely cover the bottom of a specimen bottle.

Nevertheless, like many women, Anna tended to develop
crushes on her gynecologists, especially the odd chap who flirted
with her. She remembered one in particular. She had gone to him
for her postnatal checkup, six weeks after having Amy. What felt
like his entire hand had been deep inside her for a full five
minutes.
Finally he looked up from between her legs and told her in
a voice which, in this case, was definitely soft and sexy that
for a woman who had delivered two very large babies, she
possessed particularly tight vaginal muscles. When he added
the bit about this being vital to good sex because the muscles
needed to support the shaft of a man's penis, Anna knew this
was more than mere medical observation. She didn't know whether
to jump on him or report him to the BMA for gross misconduct.

In the end she did neither. She simply said that he was
obviously fond of tinkling the ovaries, but if he'd finished
tinkling hers, she wouldn't mind having them back. He withdrew
his hand as if he had touched scalding water.

W
hat I'll do then, if it's all right with you,” Reenie continued, “is fax the gentleman your details, and then if he
is agreeable we should think about arranging an initial
tayte-a-tayte for the two of you. Does that sound acceptable
to yourself?”

Anna was miles away. She was imagining surgeons in
gowns and masks taking it in turns to massage her inner thighs
with K-Y jelly.

“Are you still there, Anna deah? .   .   . Ay
was just wondering if that arrangement would be acceptable?”

Anna confirmed that indeed, it would be.

C H A P T E R     T W E L V E

F
OR THE FOURTH TIME THAT DAY, Dan sat in one of the cubicles
in the
Vanguard
gents breathing rapidly and
heavily into a Pret à Manger brown paper bag. Once
again the desperate urge to take his blood pressure, combined
with the knowledge that he no longer possessed his electronic
sphygmomanometer, had caused him to hyperventilate.

As his blood oxygen levels gradually returned to normal
and his head stopped swimming, he took his face out of the bag.
At the same time he reassured himself that although he was
experiencing the odd setback, he had over the last couple of
days made excellent progress in his attempts to live without
his medical appliances. His panics about not being able to take
his blood pressure or test his urine for sugar were undoubtedly
becoming less frequent.

Dan also noticed he was developing fewer symptoms than
usual. In fact, apart from the malignant melanoma on the back
of his hand, which the helpful lady pharmacist in Boots had
diagnosed as a liver spot, he had in the last forty-eight hours
experienced no worrying symptoms at all.

He smiled a triumphant smile. Then he folded up the
Pret à Manger bag and slipped it inside his jacket
pocket, just in case he needed to use it again.

D
an sauntered back to his desk, picked up the phone to check
his voice mail and at the same time downed the last inch
of his decaf, which had become lukewarm while he was in the gents.
There was one message. This was from a mate at the
Standard
offering to buy him lunch the following week. He put down the
phone and screwed up his face, not as a reaction to the taste
of tepid coffee, or because he didn't want to have lunch with
his mate from the
Standard,
but because he was
suddenly despondent. Derek Foster should have got back to
him by now.

D
erek was in his seventies, and although he had officially
retired from journalism, he still knocked out a couple of
thrillers a year, mainly whodunits based round the Stock Exchange. A few months ago he began submitting a small investor
column to the
Vanguard.
Dan had been so
impressed that he had commissioned it as a regular fea- ture.

Dan had taken to him from their first meeting. He found it
almost impossible to believe that this easygoing piss artist
was once the most feared news editor in Fleet Street.

In the sixties, when he ran the newsdesk at the
Courier,
it was said that no other news editor in the
country was capable of keeping a check on the whereabouts of his
reporters like Derek Foster. No matter where they were, or
what time of day it was, Foster could root them out.

This was due to him invariably having about his person
his battered red exercise book. This contained every number of
every public phone in every journalist's haunt from Costello's
Bar in New York to the Plaka Taverna in Nicosia. Fleet Street
legend had it that the night the Six-Day War ended in Israel
in 1967, Derek knew exactly where in Tel Aviv the reporters
would go to get pissed and laid, and roughly what time they
would leave and what time they would be passing a particular
public phone box on the beachfront. At two-fifteen in the morning
he rang the number and let it ring continuously. A very drunk
but curious
Courier
reporter answered the phone and
was told by Derek to sober up and get his arse to LA by the
next day because Spencer Tracy had been found dead at his
kitchen table by Katharine Hepburn and she might be available
for an interview.

D
an had last spoken to Derek a day ago. They had spent five
minutes or so discussing what Derek was planning to put
in that week's column, and then, for no reason in particular,
Dan found himself telling Derek about Brenda's night with
Giles Hardacre, and how Lavender Hardacre was threatening to
go to the papers.

Dan had barely got to the end of the tale when Derek
burst into a long and very wicked Sid James–style cackle.

“No need to go on. I get the picture. If it's dirt you're
looking for, look no further.”

Derek said he was almost positive his son had been at
university with Lavender. He remembered being told the story
of how, in her final year, she got rolling drunk at the rugby
club dinner and did a striptease on the dance floor. The MC
had joined in and the pair of them ended up shagging in front
of two hundred people.

“What's more, she continued to put it about after marrying
Giles Hardacre. She's been known secretly amongst the Dempster
lot for years as Shagger Hardacre. Christ only knows why no
newspaper's ever done her over. You'd think it was right up the
Mirror
's street.”

Derek said he would double-check with his son, but he was
pretty sure he'd got the rugby club dinner story right because
you didn't get too many girlies to the pound called Lavender.

Dan hadn't been in the slightest bit surprised to discover
Derek's connection with Lavender Hardacre. Over the years there
had been umpteen occasions when he'd got to the bottom of some
financial scandal or other after receiving a piece of priceless
information from an improbable source. It was Murphy's Law that
this kind of luck only occurred, if it occurred at all, after
weeks and weeks of fruitless, bollock-breaking phone bashing. What
knocked Dan for six was that this was the first time in his
career he had achieved such an astonishing result on the first
phone call.

Dan's amazement and self-congratulation were short-lived.
Derek had promised to phone his son and get back to Dan in an
hour or so. That was yesterday lunchtime. Dan had heard nothing
since. By now he was pretty sure Derek had been thinking about
a different woman.

Dan, who had really been looking forward to impressing
Brenda with his sleuthing powers, decided he would console
himself, instead, with a large slice of the canteen's
disgustingly commercial chocolate cake which always came
topped with a collapsed hillock of spray-on cream.

He stood up and checked that his wallet was in his
back pocket. He'd walked across the newsroom, and had almost reached
the door, when he heard his phone go. Something about the ring,
which of course was no different from usual, told him precisely
who was calling. He shot back to his desk.

“Dan, it's Derek here. Sorry to have taken so long to
get back to you, mate, but my son has been away for a few days.
Only got back last night. Look, this is just to confirm that your
lady and mine are one and the same. I reckon that's a very
large lunch you owe me.   .   .   .”

A
nna and Brenda stood on the pavement, their noses pressed up
against the restaurant window.

“I can't see a tall fair-haired bloke sitting on his own.
Everybody's in twos or fours,” Brenda said, wiping condensation
from the glass with the end of her sleeve.

Anna said she couldn't either. She then announced that she
had no intention of hanging around for hours in the dark until
he decided to turn up. Reenie Theydon-Bois had promised that
Quasimodo would be waiting for her at the Bhaji on the Bush
in the Goldhawk Road, just before eight. It was now two minutes
past. Anna stood back from the restaurant window and said that
if he didn't show up in the next five minutes they might as well
go for a drink in the pub opposite and then head off home. She
sounded cross and irritated, but Brenda suspected it was just
nerves.

She was right. Anna was still petrified that Quasimodo
might be a paranoid schizophrenic. The last time she spoke
to Reenie Theydon-Bois she had asked if she could have his telephone
number—she was desperate to check him out before meeting
him—but Reenie had refused. She was also only prepared
to give Anna a vague idea of what he looked like. Anna assumed
this was because Reenie was desperate for her fee and probably
never gave much information away because she didn't want to risk
putting clients off. All Anna knew about Quasimodo was that he
was forty-two, very tall, exceedingly
distinguished-looking and blond.

E
arlier that evening, Anna had phoned Dan at the office to tell him that she and Brenda were going out for a girlie
dinner and would be back late. Dan decided to save the pleasure
of telling them both his good news on the Hardacre front until
later.

By seven o'clock Anna was getting dressed. She was
determined not to get too glammed up as she didn't want to give
a potential rapist the impression she was gagging to get laid.
She decided on jeans and a smart jacket. She had got one leg
into her Levis and was just about to hobble onto the landing
to call down to Denise and remind her it was Josh and Amy's
hairwash night, when Brenda, who had agreed to come on Mission
Quasimodo with Anna, came into the room to show off her outfit
for the evening.

Brenda had promised—not before she had raised
several objections about how disloyal she felt she was being
to Dan—to wait round the corner from the Bhaji on the Bush
in her car, mobile phone at the ready, so that Anna could ring
for help if Quasimodo proved troublesome. To mark the undercover
nature of the mission, Brenda was wearing combat fatigues and
had applied a touch of camouflage paint to her face.

“You know me,” she said, giving Anna a quick twirl.
“I couldn't go out on night maneuvers without getting into
the spirit of the occasion.”

A
nna was on the point of declaring that Quasimodo's time was
up and they should go for a drink across the road
when she noticed a very tall chap with a mass of thick fair
hair walking alone towards the restaurant.

“That has to be him,” she said in a screeched whisper.
“Start walking. Look casual. Don't attract his attention.”

The two of them began strolling down the road. After a
minute they turned back and resumed their position in front
of the restaurant window.

“Blimey, Brenda,” Anna said, staring in through the
glass. “That is one very tall, very blond man.”

“Yeah, he is gor-geous,” Brenda said, virtually salivating.
“Looks exactly like Johnny Weissmuller in those Tarzan films.
You can just see 'im in one of those leopardskin miniskirt
things.”

“Brenda, the only thing I can see this guy in is a brown
shirt and a swastika armband. He is far too Aryan for my taste.
Definitely not my type. Bren, I think I'm going to give this
one a miss.”

“Oh, no you don't!” Brenda's tone was full of command
as she found herself warming to her military persona. She was
certain Anna was just looking for an excuse to duck out of the
meeting. In an instant she had frog-marched her the few paces
to the restaurant door.

“Phone me,” she said, “if he starts goose-stepping
around the restaurant, claiming he's only following orders.”

With that she opened the restaurant door and almost threw
Anna inside.

A
nna regained her balance and took a deep, calming breath.
The air was the usual popadam palace mix of cumin and
cigarettes. She'd eaten at the Bhaji on the Bush a couple of
times with Dan. Looking round she noticed it had been redecorated
since her last visit. The red flock wallpaper was now a deep
petrol blue. Everything else was just as she remembered it:
battered chairs covered in burgundy Dralon, a single carnation
in a slim white vase on every table, pale-pink linen and, in
one corner of the restaurant, underneath a giant, gaudy print
of the Taj Mahal at dawn, a cart loaded with stainless-steel
pickle pots.

The tables near the window were taken. The chap Anna
assumed to be Quasimodo was sitting at the back of the
restaurant, near the bar. Anna adjusted her bag strap on her
shoulder and pushed her hair behind her ears. Squeezing past
a waiter who was taking an order for six chicken vindaloos
with extra chilis from a group of lagered-up blokes in Lacoste
shirts and hooped earrings, Anna started walking towards the
blond man's table.

She could see him dunking a piece of popadom into some
pale-green yogurt and bringing it towards his mouth. En route,
the yogurt began to drizzle down his fingers and drip onto
his purple-and-gold silk tie. In a couple of seconds two long
milky rivulets were coursing down his front. Realizing what he
had done, he began rubbing at the tie with a pink napkin. His
mass of straight fair hair was without a trace of gray. It made
him look far younger than forty-two. Anna would have said he wasn't
a day over thirty-four. She stood next to the table, watching
him. He hadn't noticed her.

“You'll ruin the silk if you carry on like that,” she
said by way of announcing herself. She sounded far more assured
than she felt. “Quasimodo, I presume. Hi, I'm Anna.” Smiling,
she held out her hand.

“Oh, right, Christ,” he said, clearly flustered, but
managing to return Anna's smile. His look of confusion had turned,
almost immediately, into one of delight. For a longish moment
he surveyed her face. His eyes gazed into hers. They remained
there just a moment too long. Finally he appeared to sense her
discomfort. His eyes shot down towards the pink napkin, which
he was still holding. Then he stood up too quickly, jogging
the table as he went. This sent several pieces of cutlery flying
onto the floor. He was slim, broad-shouldered and towered over
her. Blushing, he leaned across the table and shook her hand.

“I seem to have got myself into a bit of a pickle.” He
chuckled, pushing back some of his hair, which had flopped into
his face, and indicating the huge greasy stain. His voice, which
was a touch Gordonstoun and the Guards, confirmed Anna's
suspicion that it was a Gieves and Hawkes tie.