Virtue (33 page)

Harriet is cross-legged on the floor, a glass of something colourless, cold and delicious-looking nursed in her fingers. Mike is still in the armchair, spread out now like someone who’s been here for months, feet under the coffee table, hands hanging down the sides. A can of beer sits open on the table. He hasn’t taken a glass.

‘Nothing. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. Lindsey picks up the pot and stands there holding it, going, “Is there a problem, madam?”, and puts on the “Well, you told me to heat it up. Didn’t you tell me to heat it up?” act. And because she’s holding it, no one can exactly … Oh, hi, soldier, you’re awake.’

Mike tears his eyes from Harriet’s face and gives me a smile. ‘How are you feeling?’

It takes a couple of seconds for anything to come out. ‘Has Henry been anywhere near my mouth? Only it feels like it.’

They both laugh. ‘He’s out doing his Henry thing,’ says Harriet, which means that there will probably be a disembowelled something on the doormat in the morning. He likes to bring us presents, but he can rarely be bothered to carry anything up the stairs. ‘How’s the head?’

I groan. ‘Agony.’

‘Well, you were lucky Mike was there,’ she says glibly. ‘You might not have a head at all.’

I sit up. ‘Harriet! This is actually serious, you know!’

‘Oh, I know.’ She takes a sip of her drink. ‘But if you can’t have a laugh when someone tries to kidnap you, I don’t know when you can.’

Harriet always reacts to bad stuff with wisecracks. It’s a posh thing, I think. ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it could have been a random thing.’

What’s more, the wisecracks really get on my tits when they get out of hand, and it seems like she hasn’t taken in just how scary this latest episode has been. ‘Listen, Cleopatra, get real. There’s obviously someone on our case and we need to think what we’re going to do.’

‘Cleopatra?’ asks Mike.

‘Queen of Denial,’ Harriet tosses at him, and glues her crown firmly to her head. ‘What evidence have you got that there’s anything personal about what’s happened lately?’

‘Urr. Doh. What evidence have I got that it’s not, stupid?’

‘Okay. So someone broke into the restaurant. People break into restaurants all the time.’

‘They usually empty the till and nick the drink,’ Mike points out mildly. ‘It’s not that common to carve “Traitor” into the kitchen surfaces.’

‘What would you know about it?’ says Harriet. Which I take to be more evidence of denial.

‘Someone broke into the restaurant two weeks after all the tabloids went big on it,’ I say crossly. ‘Pretty big coincidence.’

‘And don’t forget the emails,’ adds Mike.

‘No, I continue, don’t forget the emails.’

‘Oh, please.’ Harriet waves this away. ‘I get emails like that all the bloody time. If I started crying and running to the Plod every time I got one my complexion would be completely ruined. Anyway–’ she gets up, rattles Mike’s empty beer tin, trying to change the subject – ‘Another?’

He shakes his head. ‘Thanks. I’ve got to be going. I was only waiting around to make sure that Sleeping Beauty didn’t slip into a coma or anything.’

He picks up his jacket, swings it round to put it on without getting up, and something made of black plastic falls from his pocket, clatters on the floor. ‘Oops,’ he says. ‘It’s always doing that.’

‘Mobiles,’ says Harriet, ‘are the bane of the twenty-first century.’ She comes over to pick it up. ‘If they’re not going off in church they’re falling out of your pocket and costing a million quid in upgrades.’

She’s about to hand it to him when she looks down and frowns. ‘What on earth is this?’ she says, holding it up on display like a spokesmodel presenting to camera on QVC. Instead of a keypad, it has two dials and a digital numerical display.

‘Oh, that? That’s my radio.’

‘Radio?’

‘Mmm.’ He puts his hand out for it.

‘Like in alpha alpha tango foxtrot?’

He nods.

‘Sierra bravo cartwheel tampon goblin two-four?’

‘Sort of thing.’

‘What are you, a policeman or something?’

‘Well, yeah,’ he says.

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he says, ‘I thought you knew.’

‘Why on earth would I know?’

‘Well, we have met before. And you acted like you recognised me. So I assumed you—’

‘Well, I did recognise you. But …’ She frowns off into the distance. ‘So why did I …? Christ. You’re not the Plod that came to the restaurant?’

Mike nods. ‘The self-same Plod.’

‘Good grief.’

‘Love you too,’ he says. Then manages a laugh despite the fact that I think I’d be more than a tad browned off in his position. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘this Plod has an early shift tomorrow, so I’m going to proceed towards my motor vehicle, if you don’t mind.’ He digs in his jacket pocket, jangles some keys in his hand. ‘You going to be all right, midget?’

Midget. Huh. I attempt to stand up, slump back onto my cushions. I guess if he can take being called a Plod without demur, I can deal with slurs on my height. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I reply. ‘And Mike?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Thank you. Thank you for everything.’

He puts on a policeman’s voice. ‘That’s all right, madam. All in the line of duty.’ Then he says, in a normal voice, ‘But you two have got to think about the stuff that’s been happening. I don’t think anyone but your friend here would think that the two incidents were unconnected. With the emails and that.’

Harriet glares silently. He makes for the door.

‘I’ll come back in a couple of days and we can discuss your possible best course of action under the circumstances.’

Oh, goody, I think. It’s nice when a man’s sense of duty brings him winging back. I don’t know how Harriet didn’t actually pick up that this man was a copper. He has all the verbal inflections, dipping in and out of a formal, structured way of speaking, as though he were in court trying to sound official.

He reaches the door, Harriet still standing there glaring, and turns to face the room. ‘Oh, and girls,’ he says, ‘when I come back, I don’t want to find anything like this lying around where I can fall over it.’ He holds something up between index finger and thumb. It is a piece of rolled cardboard, secured within a Rizla, one end ragged from contact with many lips, the other slightly charred. ‘I know policemen are supposed to be stupid,’ he says, ‘but you should maybe think about emptying your ashtrays from time to time.’

Oops. I go bright red. Harriet suddenly smiles.

‘I’ll escort you to your vehicular transport,’ she says.

She returns, Henry draped over her shoulder looking smug as she says all those girl-things like ‘Who’s the most bee-you-tiful boy in the world, then? Who’s the coolest cat in London? Who’s the coolest cat in the world? Have you had adventures, my fine gentleman? What did you get up to? Didjoo killsome bugs? Didjoo catch an urfworm?’

Henry yawns pinkly, eyes turning inside-out, great vampire teeth dried by stinky cat-breath, and stretches a long golden front leg down her back as he shifts his body weight to get more comfortable. ‘Wooaaah,’ says Harriet, running a hand over his head, down his back, rubbing the base of his tail to make him squirm. ‘Who’s my baby?’

If there were a man in the room, he would no doubt be making cracks about biological time-clocks at this juncture. It takes a very rare man to understand that the thing between women and their cats is nothing to do with babies. Yes, we like to baby them, to pick them up and turn them over and cradle them, to talk nonsense and coo at them while they fix us with placid stares of patronising contentment, but it’s not a baby thing. It’s an admiration thing. Henry is the dude I respect most in the world.

Cats are everything we aspire to be. Look at them: they’re long and slinky and elegant, with no awkward lumps that get in the way when they’re running. They never get bed-hair, and if they do, all they have to do is run a paw over it and it’s perfect. The perfect slashes of eyeliner beneath their lashes never streak when they get overexcited. They have cheekbones to die for. They never let themselves be pushed around. They sleep eighteen hours a day and no one ever tells them that there can be such a thing as sleeping too much, you know. When they curl up and try to look cute, they actually look cute instead of looking mad and blobby. Their primary talent is finding quiet places on major thoroughfares where people will take the time to stop and pay homage, and instead of being called egotistical, everyone admires them for it. They can stay up all night and still look great the next day. But most of all, we love them because they accept love as it is not how they think it should be: never lie awake obsessing about imagined slights, never complain that someone’s not there for them, never sit up stuffing their faces with chocolate and playing
Wonderwall
over and over on the record player.

She sits down on the sofa beside me, says, ‘Go on, give us a kiss,’ and Henry lazily raises his head for a moment, presses the tip of his nose against the tip of hers and resumes fur-tippet position, eyes closed in sybaritic repose. ‘Thank you,’ says Harriet, ‘that was a lovely kiss.’ And then she says to me, ‘I know he’s cute and all that, but what’s with the copper?’

I knew this was coming. Harriet has a strange aversion to policemen. I think it comes from the time she was stopped for riding her bike through a pedestrian precinct at three in the morning and got banged up for the night for asking if the Plod in question didn’t have a burglary to go to.

‘He’s a very nice policeman and he was worried. What was I supposed to do? Say thank you for saving my life, now bugger off?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t you have written a cheque out to the injured coppers’ fund or something?’

‘I suppose so. But you’re not supposed to leave people with concussion on their own, and he didn’t seem to mind. Anyway, what’s the big deal?’

This stumps her, so she just strokes the back of Henry’s neck and glares at me. Eventually, she says, sulkily, like someone who knows that they’re just about to be told they’re talking bollocks, ‘He’ll have seen the mess.’

There’s not much I do in response to this but laugh.

‘No,’ she says, ‘no. Everyone knows that policemen are terribly respectable. He’ll have taken one look at this place and put us on the at-risk register or something.’

I laugh again, though it busts my head to do so. ‘Darling, I think we have to be children for him to do something like that.’

‘Don’t laugh,’ she says. ‘We’ll probably have the drug squad round tomorrow because you’re so bloody careless.’

I shake my head, which hurts as well. ‘Not me, darling.’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me.’

I shrug. I’m not too bothered, to be honest. If Mike were going to do something, he’d have done it, or he’d have gone away and said nothing and come back later with half a dozen large dogs and some blokes with guns. He certainly wouldn’t have just waved the roach around and wagged his finger. ‘I think it’s okay, Haz.’

‘And what about this kidnapping business?’

‘Ah, yes,’ I say.

‘When are we getting the visit? Giving the statements? Having our hard drive taken away for monitoring? Getting the phone tap put in?’

I feel pretty pissed off about this. No, actually: a lot more than pretty pissed off. I’ve been stalked, manhandled, concussed and frightened shitless, my entire family history has been turned on its head and I’m still dealing with the fact that I have effectively become an orphan, and all Harriet can do is worry about her precious privacy. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, Harriet,’ I find myself snapping, ‘I protected your precious anonymity. I sat there telling them that I didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened while I was having this huge lump on my skull X-rayed. No one knows it’s because of you. After all, people get dragged into vans by bunches of skinheads every day in London. They’ve just made an incident report and forgotten about it already.’

‘Well, apart from that bloke. He’s going to be on our case for ever now.’

I feel very, very tired. ‘Well, maybe he ought to be, but I don’t think he will.’

‘Huh,’ says Harriet, and I come as close to hitting her as I ever have in the course of our long and chequered history.

‘Huh?’ I ask in reply. ‘What’s “huh” about?’

She doesn’t say anything.

‘Don’t huh me and then bloody go into your shell. I’m sorry he found the roach, but he also saved my life, probably, while I was doing you a favour this afternoon.’

‘Oh, good one. Ever so sorry to have asked you to do me a favour. It won’t happen again.’

I sigh wearily. It’s amazing how you can love someone to distraction and still find them more infuriating than anyone in the world. Suddenly, I don’t want to carry on this conversation; I can tell it’s going to turn into an argument.

‘Can I go to bed now,’ I say, ‘if you’re not going to take this seriously?’

‘I am taking this seriously.’

‘You’re not, Harriet. We’re going to have to think about what we’re going to do. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.’

‘How’s the head?’

‘Throbbing. And I feel sick.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘Do you want Henry?’

I sigh. You can try with Harriet, but you can turn blue in the face before she’ll concede a point. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Want a painkiller?’

‘I took some just before I went to sleep.’

Harriet hands me Henry, who immediately struggles out of my arms and sits on the floor looking murderous.

‘Right.’ I push myself up on the arm of the sofa like an old lady, stand there rubbing the small of my back like someone pregnant. ‘I’m going to sleep. Can you check if I’m still breathing in the morning, please?’

‘I’ll come and throw a glass of water in your face,’ she says in her usual loving manner.

I wobble towards the door. Then she goes, ‘Oh, here’s something that’ll cheer you up. Niggle called.’

‘Who?’

‘Niggle.’

‘Who?’

‘Your Antipodean playmate.’

‘Ah.’ I feel instantly more cheerful.

‘He says he’s going to be back in London for the weekend. Said he couldn’t wait to play dress-ups.’