Never Tell (22 page)

‘Going up to town.’ Subtly I backed away. ‘In a bit of a rush, actually.’

‘Ooh, lovely,’ she purred. ‘Meeting James there? Nice bit of lunch?’ Coyly she raised an overplucked ginger brow, insinuating a friendship we didn’t have. ‘Or perhaps a night alone for the grown-ups?’

I stared at the stubbly regrowth of her eyebrow. ‘He’s away on business,’ I said, inching towards my car.

‘Gone on ahead? I saw him last night in Oxford, actually. Frank actually took me out for dinner.’ Badly she attempted self-deprecation. ‘Lucky old me!’

I looked at her. ‘You can’t have seen him. He’s in Vietnam.’

‘I’m sure it was James’s car.’ Her frown was almost studious, her pink lipstick like it had been sealed on with varnish. ‘I remember because he was going so fast, silly boy, and talking on his phone at the same time. A girl beside him.’

‘Can’t have been James,’ I said, grasping my bag. ‘Sorry, Helen, but I’ve really got to get going. See you soon.’

She was poisonous, reputation apparently well-earned as the local gossip, according to the few school mums who had befriended me; she took pleasure in malice and spite, they said. Deep below the surface there must be some terrible insecurity, some reason she was so odious. But I hadn’t seen it yet.

Why then did I feel shaken as I swallowed my aspirin and turned my own car towards London?

I had such mixed feelings about going to the newspaper that at the last minute I slunk up the fire stairs to avoid the busy lift. Xavier was looking at the page layout on his desk when I stuck my head around his door.

‘My my, it’s Mata Hari,’ he drawled.

‘Ha blinking ha.’ I took my sunglasses off.

‘Why, pray, are you wearing a not very good disguise?’

‘I’m just feeling shy. Pour us a coffee, please.’ Peeling off my woolly hat, I slumped on the leather sofa. ‘I’m absolutely gasping and I’ve just done 100 m.p.h. the whole way down the M40.’

‘Hungover?’ Xav eyed me suspiciously as he reshuffled the headlines.

‘I wish. I slept so badly last night I’m practically tripping now.’ I thought of Danny’s mouth on my neck. I felt heat suffuse my body.

‘I thought you’d given up illegal substances for Lent.’

‘Funny. I couldn’t – I couldn’t sleep actually.’ I pushed the memories down. ‘This Kattan thing’s really beginning to bug me. I wish you’d never mentioned it, you know.’

‘Right …’ His desk phone rang. ‘Well, I’ve got some news for you.’

‘Brilliant.’ I sat up, alert for the first time that day.

‘It’s not brilliant, actually.’ He picked up the receiver.

I poured us both coffee from the percolator in the corner whilst Xavier harangued whoever was on the end of the line. His office was as immaculate as ever, his stereo gently playing Bach, his reference books neatly ordered, magazines stacked in date order, all belying the frenetic nature of his job. Behind his sleek head hung a framed picture of a younger and more carefree us in evening dress, laughing at the Journalism Awards the year before I married; beside it a picture of the photographer Dean Harding in a flak jacket, taken just before he was killed in Afghanistan last year. Much loved, much mourned.

‘Get Johnny Field on to it, now,’ Xav snapped into the phone. ‘Cherie Blair might be fucking litigious, but I will not go down the whole fucking Caplin route again and get shot in the arse with no story to show for it.’ He dropped the phone into its cradle with disdain. ‘Fucking
Telegraph
. Stealing our bloody thunder a-fucking-gain.’

‘Kattan …’ I began.

‘The Kattan story is going nowhere,’ Xav said flatly, adding four sweeteners to his coffee.

‘Look, I know I’ve been a bit flaky about it all,’ I soothed. ‘But give me a chance.’

‘I mean it’s going nowhere because it’s a dead end.’ He studied his manicured fingernail as if it were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. ‘It’s not you, darling. It’s me. I’m pulling the plug on it.’

‘But I am finally getting somewhere.’ I put my coffee down and leaned on the desk. ‘There’s a story there, Xav, I know there is. Maya Kattan is a haunted woman with what I reckon are some seriously dodgy politics. She’s all over the shop. I think she might have been radicalised by her Somalian boyfriend. Just let me—’

‘Rose, I admire your passion, as ever. But you’re not listening. I said it’s a dead end.’

‘But why? I don’t understand.’

‘Just accept it, sweetheart. I’ll give you something far better. How about the front row at London Fashion Week?’

I stared at him, appalled. ‘Is that a joke?’

‘No. Perfect if you want to get back into the game.’ He met my eye coolly. ‘Rose, you have to accept things are not the same since you had the kids. You haven’t worked for over four years, not properly. You turned down Basra, you—’

‘I was five months pregnant with twins, Xav,’ I protested. ‘Even journalists have kids. I could never have been embedded then. It wasn’t fair on anyone.’

‘True. But male journalists don’t have to pop ‘em out,’ he said. ‘It’s just fact, darling. Brutal, perhaps, but fact. You made the choice, not me.’

‘You bastard.’

He raised a lazy eyebrow. ‘I’ve been called worse, angel.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I muttered. ‘But you still haven’t explained why.’ I was increasingly frustrated. ‘I think Maya Kattan is seriously in danger. I think they’re doping her up to keep her prisoner.’

‘Well, call the police then.’ He stood up and walked to the window.

‘I did. But we don’t just call the police, do we? I mean, that’s not our job.’

‘This is dead in the water.’ His McQueen suit hung beautifully from his short slim frame as he stared down at the busy road. ‘Let’s just say it’s in the paper’s interest to drop it.’

‘Since when have you worried about the paper’s interest?’

He just kept staring out at the grey sky, and I noticed for the first time how gaunt his clever face was, and realised he was deadly serious.

‘Our job is to uncover the bloody truth,’ I said slowly, computing the information. ‘Which is in the public’s interest, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t go into more detail now, Rose. Just take no for an answer.’

‘Has Kattan warned you off? Has that bloody—’ I clenched and unclenched my fists. ‘Has Danny Callendar been here?’

‘Who?’ said Xav unconvincingly.

‘Danny Callendar. Tall, Scottish, taciturn. Works for Kattan. I think,’ I took a deep breath, ‘I think—’

‘What?’ For a second I had his attention.

I think he might have had a hand in the death up at Kattans house. I think he might be a murderer
.

‘I think that anyone who employs a – a bodyguard is suspect, don’t you? Anyone who isn’t Britney.’

I know I can’t get him out of my head
.

‘Do you really think I’d bow to the whim of some oik? Be careful not to see what you want to see, Rose.’ Xav snapped the Venetian blind shut. ‘Two plus two make five if you do the maths wrong.’

‘Really?’ I retorted. Something was most definitely not adding up here. ‘So why the hell hasn’t anyone covered the death at the manor? There’s not been a whisper outside bloody Oxfordshire.’

‘Like I said, Rose,’ Xavier turned back to me, ‘it’s not in our interest right now to investigate Kattan. Should there actually be anything to investigate.’

‘You thought there was a few days ago.’ I could feel my blood pressure rising.

‘I changed my mind.’

‘Well, change it back. I think there could be a major scoop here, Xavier.’

He took his jacket off and hung it on the chair. I could see from his pristine shirt that he was sweating lightly. ‘Write it if you like, but I can’t print it.’

‘Can’t – or won’t?’ My anger spilt over now.

‘Can’t, won’t – it’s all the same,’ he snapped.

‘Xavier, this isn’t you talking, I know it isn’t.’ I was thoroughly confused. ‘Look, Maya Kattan says her father might have been looking at a peerage, but he’s—’

‘For fuck’s sake, Rose,’ he howled. ‘It might be fascinating but just bloody well forget it.’

Rarely had I seen him so ruffled. My fists clenched defensively by my side again. ‘Don’t shout at me, Xav, please.’

‘Well, just bloody take no for an answer.’ He looked ill, I realised. He never sweated normally; he was far too self-possessed.

‘But you’re –’ my voice was rising – ‘you’re not telling me—’

There was a knock at the door. Xav’s assistant, Joy, stuck her head round it nervously.

‘Hello, stranger.’ Beneath her neat afro her friendly face broke into a smile. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

‘Hi, Joy.’ I struggled to regain my composure. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine thanks. Sorry to interrupt, Xav …’

I shot him a look. He’d probably primed her.

‘ … But Lord Higham’s office is on the phone. They really need to know if you’re planning to attend the lunch on Thursday?’

‘Tell them,’ and this time Xav avoided my stunned gaze, ‘tell them I’d be honoured.’

‘Come and say hello before you go, won’t you?’ Joy said as she quickly shut the door behind her, escaping the atmosphere inside the room.

‘Lord Higham?’ I felt the old fear well up.

‘Yes, bloody old Higham,’ he snapped again. ‘I don’t know why you’re so obsessed.’

I felt like I didn’t know my old friend at all. ‘I didn’t realise – is he courting you now?’

‘No, you dunce.’ Xav opened the jet cigarette-box on his desk wearily and pulled out a packet of nicotine gum. ‘He’s just bought the bloody paper.’

UNIVERSITY, MARCH 1992

Shame is the shawl of Pink
In which we wrap the Soul
.

Emily Dickinson

I wasn’t sure what was worse. The disappointment and confusion in my parents’ eyes when I woke up in the hospital, or the sadness I caught on the face of Dalziel’s father the next day as he walked past my room with the third Lady Higham, Charlie’s mother. They looked so bowed in grief, I had to turn my head away.

I was truly ashamed. I hid my face from the nurses, the doctors, the porters and the cleaners. I refused to see my friends. I thought everyone was judging me. I was glad to be in my tiny room, away from the rest of Oxford. I thought everyone knew what I’d done; that they could see my stupidity.

One night the jolly Brummie from the student paper came to see me, the girl who’d written so scathingly about Dalziel. Only she wasn’t so jolly any more.

‘Did you know he tried to kill me?’ She sat beside me on the brown hospital chair, stiff and upright, her left eye almost entirely closed, a rainbow of bruises around it, one cheekbone bandaged.

I stared at her. ‘No, of course I didn’t.’ From her tone it was obvious she believed I was somehow complicit. ‘How would I know that?’

‘Because you were his best friend.’

I weighed up her words for a moment. I thought how ironic it was that two months ago I would have been ecstatic to hear those words, to hear our relationship validated by an outsider, but now, now I was simply embarrassed.

‘I had no idea, I promise you,’ I whispered, tears springing to my own sore eyes. She looked at me and then she shook her head.

‘You idiot. You bunch of arrogant idiots. Did you not see what you were doing? The sheer futile stupidity?’

‘If I had,’ I gazed out of the window; the dusk sky was choppy with cloud, ‘if I had, do you really think I would have continued?’

Apparently Dalziel had been waiting for her as she left the newspaper office. He had promised her a story she couldn’t refuse and the pair of them had walked to her car, where somehow he had persuaded her to let him drive. It wasn’t until he was behind the wheel, she said, that she realised he was out of his head. It wasn’t until he aimed the car straight at the wall of Magdalen Bridge that she realised his intentions; that he was apparently trying to kill her. To kill both of them, perhaps. She had broken her cheekbone in the impact, knocked unconscious, whilst, typically, Dalziel had walked away almost unscathed. Physically unscathed, anyway.

I remembered the ambulance racing past the pub. I remembered Dalziel’s glittering eyes, the spot of blood on his white cuff. I clutched the blanket with both hands. How had it come to this? How I had not seen Dalziel’s madness? I had been blinded by his beauty and his love – his apparent love – that was the truth. Blinded by the apparent aura of certainty and strength – and the opium haze I’d lived in for the past few months.

‘He’s offered me money, you know,’ the girl said, ‘Lord Higham. Blood money, to keep quiet.’

‘Are you going to take it?’ I asked.

‘Well, he’s offered me a job too, on the Sun.’ She looked away, out of the window. ‘I haven’t decided what to do yet. But you –’ she looked back at me – ‘you should write about it.’

I stared at her blankly. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a fucking exclusive, that’s why. The inner workings of a megalomaniac’s mind. Every journalist’s dream.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘I’m not a journalist – and he wasn’t that.’ And I felt the tears pool in my eyes. ‘He was just my friend.’ My hands plucked the blanket. ‘My very very good friend.’

‘Obviously,’ she said drily.

I saw her once years later in a Clerkenwell pub when I was working at the
Guardian;
we nodded at each other but we didn’t speak. She did take the job at the
Sun
, though, that much I knew; she became very famous as a right-wing columnist.

When I was discharged from the John Radcliffe Hospital after a few days, I went home to my parents’ house. We drove out of the small city that had seen such sights, through the meadows and the modern toy-towns laid out so neatly by planners. Nothing felt real any more.

To everyone’s relief and my eternal shock, the college authorities managed to hush the whole thing up, along with the Randolph’s management and presumably Lord Higham’s influence. There was only a very small piece in the papers about the deaths.

James had dropped out immediately. He had a massive breakdown and never finished his degree. Like me, he went home to his mother, but when she died a year later, he left the country for good, travelling to Australia and the Far East to recover. He sent me the occasional postcard, but even those stopped after a while. I missed him at first, but it was as if we couldn’t bear to see each other; to admit our shame.