She was woken by the rustle of an Evening News being stuffed under the front door. It was all foreign stuff on the front but someone had folded it round to an inside page.
There was a photo of Massingham House and a column of copy cobbled together from the morning’s post-mortem and what they’d been able to winkle out of Jim the porter.
Stockbroker crushed by Swedish carJohn Hullavington, a stockbroker of Gloucester Road, Kensington, was crushed to death last night in a freak accident with his car in the forecourt of a Mayfair luxury block. An ambulance was summoned but Mr Hullavington was pronounced dead on arrival at St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park. The Swedish-made car, a Volvo PV544, was being driven by one of his two female companions, Susan St John (20) and Jane James (19), both of Massingham House, Mayfair. Savile Row police have, as yet, been unable to determine which of the two brunettes – both of whom are believed to work as glamour models – was behind the wheel when the accident occurred. Mr Hullavington, an Oxford graduate, was a junior partner in the stockbroking firm of Banning and Holt. He was 31 and unmarried.
‘Glamour model’. Fucking cheek. Made her sound like a tart.
The phone started to ring the minute she put it back on the hook.
‘Welcome back, Janey love,’ whispered Jim. No ‘Miss James’ now. ‘Couple of gents down here say they’re from the News of the World.’
She peeped round the edge of the silk curtains and saw a man in a Burberry looking up at the front of the block. She could see flashbulbs going off, as if there was a model posing in the doorway.
‘Tell them I’m out.’
She took the phone back off the hook and ran a bath while she had a look in the fridge. Apart from some grapes and peaches in the fruit bowl there was nothing to eat in the place but a tin of shortbread, a box of marrons glacés and half a bottle of flat champagne. She had the lot then soaked in a bath of Jasmine for an hour, to wash away the smells of the night before crawling back into her unmade bed.
The Sunday Times and the Observer were in the service hatch as usual the next morning. Nothing in either of them. She put her reversible silk raincoat over her nightie, tied on a headscarf, slipped on a pair of matching kid pumps and went downstairs. Even if you are only popping out for some cigarettes, there is no excuse for dressing all anyhow. She had a quick peep through the window in the lift door when the cage clunked to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. There was no Jim at the desk but there were still two men in raincoats hanging round the main entrance, so Jane went back up to the fifth floor, left the flat by the kitchen fire escape (the two exits had come in handy after all) and ran down to the stall on Park Lane for a News of the World. She didn’t dare open it till she was back indoors.
Christ. About half of page six. Double Date Dollies Deny Death Drive. The reporters had dug out the Frockways ad and somehow got their hands on some studio shots taken by a mate of Terry’s, designed to play up the twins gimmick.
There was a photograph of Johnny, looking very handsome and very posh in cricket whites at an old boys’ match somewhere. There was a picture of his poor widowed old mother wearing a black frock, the three strings of fake pearls and a bewildered snapshot smile in the drive of the villa in Putney. Amanda, who was reading it all over breakfast with Mummy down in the country, thought the house looked a lot nicer than she remembered it. He was the only son. There was a sister, it turned out, but she’d joined a silent order on the Isle of Wight and they never spoke about her.
The medical correspondent explained matter-of-factly that after the femoral artery was severed the victim would have bled to death in eight minutes, less time than it took the ambulance to nee-naw the short drive from St George’s Hospital to Massingham House. The motoring correspondent managed to get in two paragraphs on the irony of being killed by a car designed for safety and how James and St John emerged without a scratch, safely inside the torsional wossname and the revolutionary three-point seat belt. He’d written another paragraph boring on about the four-speed gearbox but the sub-editors cut it out. The legal desk explained that if both girls denied driving there was nothing the police could do about it because one of them was telling the truth and had committed no offence. The news reporters then laid it on good and thick about how, as he slumped in the doorway of Suzy St John’s luxury Mayfair block, Johnny Hullavington, 31, felt his young life slipping away, staining the Portland Stone façade with his heart’s blood and other claptrap. There wasn’t a bloody stain, not after Jim had been round with the Jeyes Fluid.
Jane risked putting the telephone receiver back on the cradle but she had hardly done so when it rang. Jim was back on duty.
‘There’s a young man down here says he’s your brother.’
She looked around her. The flat was in a right state. The champagne glasses still hadn’t been cleared away. The ashtrays were full of fag ends and half-eaten hard centres.
‘Let me speak to him.’
She arranged to meet him in the lounge bar of a pub in Shepherd Market, making sure he knew not to say a word to the men waiting outside. She had just enough time to fix her hair and face, wriggle into Suzy’s fuchsia suit and Glenda’s navy winkle-pickers and nip down the back stairs, her high heels echoing strangely on the cast-iron steps – Smart girls know how to change from one outfit to another in double-quick time without ever looking as if they responded to a recent fire alarm. Kenneth was sat like a lemon in the corner of the bar in his green tie holding tight to an unopened packet of crisps. He reeked of Norbury.
‘You didn’t waste much time. Who put you up to it? Uncle George?’
Kenneth salted his crisps nervously.
‘June’s in a right state.’
‘Don’t tell lies, Kenneth. She wouldn’t rotten well care. Besides, it’s not her precious name in the papers, is it?’
‘She’s very upset just the same. She couldn’t get away what with Mum and Georgette and everything. She hasn’t dared tell Mum’ – as if she’d understand a blind word anyone said to her – ‘but she says you’ve broken Dad’s heart and it’s a blessing you weren’t using the name of Deeks. Croydon Education Committee can be very particular, she says.’
Unhappily for June, the CEC turned out to be equally picky when a Mrs Doreen Deeks of Pamfield Avenue, SW16 was arrested at Thornton Heath Pond later that month after asking a succession of passers-by whether they liked her nice new pink ones.
Jane went over to the bar. It was only just gone twelve but there was already a handful of regulars in: clerical workers from the big hotels clocking off after a shift and a couple of old blondes cackling into their ports and lemon. Nicely turned out, but you could tell they were on the game: hair too yellow; eyelids too blue.
An old drunk in the far corner was making a silver paper cup from the remains of an empty fag packet he had found. Jane watched as his peeling red fingertips delicately separated the silver foil from its tissue backing and moulded the goblet round his little finger. He then gummed the paper to a sticky pulp which he squished into the base before expertly firing it at the ceiling where it joined the hundreds of others that covered the smoke-browned paint like shiny little barnacles.