Jane ordered a gin and tonic and a lemonade. She could see the landlady clocking the pink suit and trying to work out where Kenneth fitted in.
‘That your brother, dearie?’
‘That’s right, up from Bournemouth for the day.’ Why Bournemouth, for heaven’s sake? Must be something about that car coat. ‘He is sixteen.’
‘Course he is, love. Looks like a nice boy.’ No he bloody didn’t.
Back at the table Kenneth put down the paper and began to tell Jane the news of his own world.
‘Your friend Carol phoned at the crack of dawn. Wanted to know if it was really you. She’d recognised that Double Dates picture. She asked for your full address but we said we didn’t know where you’d be living. Then about an hour after breakfast her dad’s car pulled up outside and this came through the letterbox.’
It was written on that peculiar paper with the chewed edges in Carol’s babyish, Marion Richardson handwriting. She was buying back Jane’s invitation to the May wedding. ‘If it was up to me,’ she said – so tidily that she must have written it out in rough first – ‘I would have been more than happy to let an old friend join Alan and I on our Big Day but the Gazette will be covering the wedding and are sending a photographer and Mum feels it would be better not.’ Carol managed, casually, to drop in the fact that they had decided to plump for the Royal Worcester as their best china and that they were still missing the six salad plates and that they had them in Allders. Alan didn’t even like salad. She also thought that Jane would be interested to know what fucking hymns they’d both chosen. She’d decided that she was going to obey Alan which was going to be a fairly safe promise as there was next to no chance of poor Alan ever, in his wildest dreams, daring to tell Carol to do anything. Once the letter was safely over the page Carol wound things up pretty sharpish, hoping this found Jane as it left Carol who was hers truly. ‘Sincerely’ would have been pushing it and ‘faithfully’ would have been a black lie in the circumstances.
‘What are the police going to do?’
‘Nothing they can do.’
Kenneth, being an expert on bloody everything, said that it was a classic Cut-throat Defence and that so long as they stuck to their story the police wouldn’t be able to touch them.
‘You’ve got a right bloody cheek, Kenneth Deeks.’ Kenneth cringed with embarrassment as the other drinkers turned to look. ‘Stick to what story?’ hissed Jane. ‘I wasn’t bloody driving.’
She flounced off to the Ladies’. It was a pigsty. There was an unfolded cardboard box on the floor to cover the holes in the lino. The toilet was blocked, the cracked yellow soap was striped with grime and there was a used French letter draped over the edge of the basin.
No well-bred girl ever paints her face at table, in the street or at the theatre. Sod that. Jane went back to the bar and made up while Kenneth reread the News of the World: He made sheep’s eyes at farmer’s daughter: when she got home she had lost her upper dentures, one of her gloves and her handbag. Happily she had retained her virginity. Didn’t say what sort of handbag.
Jane wiped her face over with a pressed powder puff (Honey Veil), gave her eyes a lick of brown-black pencil and transformed her lips into a big fat kiss of Persian Pink – an exact match for the suit.
Kenneth looked up.
‘You don’t need all that make-up. You’re pretty enough without.’ Pretty enough for what?
She took one last look at the girl in the mirror: glossy; glamorous; finished.
‘Why don’t you piss off back to Norbury, darling?’
She uncrossed her legs and carefully squirmed out from behind the table. She could feel bloodshot boozers’ eyes slithering over her knees. She shuddered with disgust and pulled her skirt down.
She catwalked back round the corner to the front entrance of Massingham House. There was a photographer and his spotty young sidekick lurking by the desk discussing football with Jim (who was making a small fortune in tips). The porter looked up in surprise when he saw the pink-suited figure open the door and sail into the foyer.
‘We weren’t expecting you back, Miss St John.’ He scuttled across the room to call the lift.
‘I know, darling,’ purred Jane, chin held nice and high for the photographs, ‘but I forgot something. I’ll be back down in a minute.’
The sidekick tore off back to get the reporter out of the pub where they’d left him and to take the film back to Fleet Street. The photographer settled down on the settee until one or both of the girls came out again. He’d have a bloody long wait.
Jane was stuffing knickers and stockings and her sapphire bracelet into her overnight bag. She could only find one of Glenda’s black patent stilettos. Pity about the sapphire ring really. The phone rang. The call came from a phone box and the voice on the other end had a peculiar, open-air sound.
‘Is that you?’ said the voice. It was Henry but it didn’t say it was Henry.
‘Yes.’
‘What are your plans?’
The police had said not to change address. Safest to be vague.
‘I thought I might go and see Lorna.’
‘Very good idea. Excellent.’
And he hung up.
Suzy hadn’t been driving either of course. She said so and Henry believed her. She had been whisked away from the police station and taken to a borrowed flat in St John’s Wood where Big Terry was waiting with a new short hairdo and a rather racy auburn rinse – A fresh hairstyle can make a woman feel reborn. Henry had found her a job as a receptionist in a big firm on Western Avenue somewhere where she could sit behind a bird’s-eye maple desk in tight cashmere sweaters – a whole new wardrobe of greens and blues to go with the auburn rinse – purring into telephones and flicking through her Architectural Review. When the divorce came through two years later and Sir Henry Swan married Susan, only child of the late Captain St John ‘Brandy’ Johnson, nobody made the Double Dates Death Drive connection. Henry made friends with some new maître d’s and Captain Swan got some new usual tables.
Jane picked up the phone again and rang Lorna. There was still that funny open-air sound. Lorna no longer messed about with silly voices:
‘Hello.’
‘It’s me.’
‘Hello.’
Lorna never felt the same about Suzy after the Evening News affair, as if the whole sordid business – her getting pregnant; the professor not wanting to marry her; her mother being a poisonous, loveless old bitch – were all somehow Suzy’s fault. She arranged for the murder of Lorna’s baby, she was capable of anything as far as Lorna was concerned.
‘Suzy killed him, you know. She put her foot down and drove straight into him.’
That ought to keep them busy. It had gone very quiet Lorna’s end. Jane leaned back and suddenly spotted the missing black shoe peeping out from under the sofa.
‘Is Glenda there?’
‘No. I thought she was away. Spain.’
‘I’ve got a feeling she’ll be around later on.’
The sound of pennies dropping.
‘All right.’
The line went dead.
Jane lugged the laundry box out of the airing cupboard and crammed in what she could: the navy grosgrain (unfortunate associations but still very useful); the red velvet; the blue faille; the two Hardy Amies numbers – poor old Tony; her cashmere twinsets and her tweed skirts. She remembered seeing a Junior Saleslady Required sign at a madam shop in Kensington High Street. You never knew.
She squeezed a dozen pairs of Glenda’s shoes round the sides then laid the mink jacket and alligator bag on top. She should be able to get a few quid for them or she could use them as bait for a new Sergio. Always supposing she wanted a new Sergio.
She checked the contents of her old manila envelope. There was over £100 in the post office savings book and another, smaller brown envelope tightly filled with crisp five pound notes which hadn’t been there before. And there, right at the bottom, still in their wallet were the birth certificate and National Insurance gubbins of the late Mary Jane Deeks (eighteen next birthday). That and her make-up all fitted nicely into Uncle George’s overnight bag.