‘I didn’t know,’ I said, ‘you knew where I lived.’
‘I didn’t. Patrick told me.’
‘You’re still seeing him then?’
The question hung in the air.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to drink?’ Anna said.
There was a half-bottle of Bell’s out in the kitchen and I poured what was left into two tumblers and we touched glasses and said, ‘Cheers.’ Anna sipped hers, made a face, then drank down most of the rest in a single swallow.
‘Patrick…’ I began.
‘I don’t want to talk about Patrick,’ she said.
Her hand touched the buckle of my belt. ‘Sit here,’ she said.
The mattress shifted with the awkwardness of my weight.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said afterwards, ‘it could be so good.’
You see what I mean about the way she lied.
Patrick and Anna got married in the French church off Leicester Square and their reception was held in the dance hall conveniently close by; it was one of the last occasions I played drums with any degree of seriousness, one of the last times I played at all. My application to join the Metropolitan Police had already been accepted and within weeks I would be starting off in uniform, a different kind of beat altogether. Val, of course, had put the band together and an all-star affair it was — Art Ellefson, Bill Le Sage, Harry Klein. Val himself was near his mercurial best, just ahead of the flirtations with heroin and free-form jazz that would sideline him in the years ahead.
At the night’s end we stood outside, the three of us, ties unfastened, staring up at the sky. Anna was somewhere inside, getting changed.
‘Christ!’ Patrick said. ‘Who’d’ve fuckin’ thought it?’
He took a silver flask from inside his coat and passed it round. We shook hands solemnly and then hugged each other close. When Anna came out, she and Patrick went off in a waiting car to spend the night at a hotel on Park Lane.
‘Start off,’ Patrick had said with a wink, ‘like you mean to continue.’
We drifted apart: met briefly, glimpsed one another across smoky rooms, exchanged phone numbers that were rarely if ever called. Years later I was a detective sergeant working out of West End Central and Patrick had not long since opened his third nightclub in a glitter of flashbulbs and champagne; Joan Collins was there with her sister, Jackie. There were ways of skirting round the edges of the law and, so far, Patrick had found most of them: favours doled out and favours returned; backhanders in brown envelopes; girls who didn’t care what you did as long as you didn’t kiss them on the mouth. Anna, I heard, had walked out on Patrick; reconciled, Patrick had walked out on her. Now they were back together again, but for how long?
When I came off duty, she was parked across the street, smoking a cigarette, window wound down.
‘Give you a lift?’
I’d moved upmarket but not by much, an upper-floor flat in an already ageing mansion block between Chalk Farm and Belsize Park. A photograph of the great drummer, Max Roach, was on the wall; Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning next to the Eric Amblers and a few Graham Greenes on the shelf; an Alex Welsh album on the record player, ready to remind me of better times.
‘So, how are things?’ Anna asked, doing her best to look as if she cared.
‘Could be worse,’ I said. In the kitchen, I set the kettle to boil and she stood too close while I spooned Nescafe into a pair of china mugs. There was something beneath the scent of her perfume that I remembered too well.
‘What does he want?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Patrick, who else?
She paused from stirring sugar into her coffee. ‘Is that what it has to be?’
‘Probably.’
‘What if I just wanted to see you for myself?’
The green in her eye was bright under the unshaded kitchen light. ‘I wouldn’t let myself believe it,’ I said.
She stepped towards me and my arms moved around her as if they had a mind of their own. She kissed me and I kissed her back. She was divorcing him, she said: she didn’t know why she hadn’t done it before.
‘He’ll let you go?’
‘He’ll let me go.’
For a moment, she couldn’t hold my gaze. ‘There’s just one thing,’ she said, ‘one thing that he wants. This new club of his, someone’s trying to have his licence cancelled.’
‘Someone?’
‘Serving drinks after hours, an allegation, nothing more.’
‘He can’t make it go away?’
Anna shook her head. ‘He’s tried.’
I looked at her. ‘And that’s all?’
‘One of the officers, he’s accused Patrick of offering him a bribe. It was all a misunderstanding, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Patrick wonders if you’d talk to him, the officer concerned.’
‘Straighten things out.’
‘Yes.’
‘Make him see the error of his ways.’
‘Look, Jimmy,’ she said, touching the back of her hand to my cheek, ‘you know I hate doing this, don’t you?’
No, I thought. No, I don’t.
‘Everything has a price,’ I said. ‘Even friendship. Friendship, especially. And tell Patrick, next time he wants something, to come and ask me himself.’
‘He’s afraid you’d turn him down.’
‘He’s right.’
When she lifted her face to mine I turned my head aside. ‘Don’t let your coffee get cold,’ I said.
Five minutes later she was gone. I sorted out Patrick’s little problem for him and found a way of letting him know if he stepped out of line again, I’d personally do my best to close him down. Whether either of us believed it, I was never sure. With or without my help, he went from rich to richer; Anna slipped off my radar and when she re-emerged, she was somewhere in Europe, nursing Val after his most recent spell in hospital, encouraging him to get back into playing. Later they got married, Val and Anna, or at least that’s what I heard. Some lives took unexpected turns. Not mine.
I stayed on in the Met for three years after my thirty and then retired; tried working for a couple of security firms, but somehow it never felt right. With my pension and the little I’d squirrelled away, I found I could manage pretty well without having to look for anything too regular. There was an investigation agency I did a little work for once in a while, nothing too serious, nothing heavy, and that was enough.
Patrick I bumped into occasionally if I went up west, greyer, more distinguished, handsomer than ever; in Soho once, close to the little Italian place where I’d spotted Anna with her bruised eye, he slid a hand into my pocket and when I felt where it had been there were two fifties, crisp and new.
‘What’s this for?’ I asked.
‘You look as though you need it,’ he said.
I threw the money back in his face and punched him in the mouth. Two of his minders had me spreadeagled on the pavement before he’d wiped the mean line of blood from his chin.
At Val’s funeral we barely spoke; acknowledged each other but little more. Anna looked gaunt and beautiful in black, a face like alabaster, tears I liked to think were real. A band played ‘Just Friends’, with a break of thirty-two bars in the middle where Val’s solo would have been. There was a wake at one of Patrick’s clubs afterwards, a free bar, and most of the mourners went on there, but I just went home and sat in my chair and thought about the three of us, Val, Patrick and myself, what forty years had brought us to, what we’d wanted then, what we’d done.
I scarcely thought about Anna at all.
Jack Kiley, that’s the investigator I was working for, kept throwing bits and pieces my way, nothing strenuous like I say, the occasional tail job, little more. I went into his office one day, a couple of rooms above a bookstore in Belsize Park, and there she sat, Anna, in the easy chair alongside his desk.
‘I believe you two know each other,’ Jack said.