‘Of course.’ My eyes are already scanning the floor around me.
‘I have to get it back.’
I was touched by the desperation in her voice.
‘Darling, if you cannot find it, please tell the staff at the Wolseley that I will pay a £10,000 reward to anyone who finds it.’
‘You won’t need to do that.’
‘Dahlink, £10,000 is nothing to me, OK? Aleksei makes that in twenty minutes. Please, just find it for me.’
She was in tears.
‘I’ll find it,’ I said. ‘You won’t need to pay any reward, I promise you.’
I was lying. A plan was forming in my head. A very beautiful plan, because instead of dulling my senses, the champagne and now the Armagnac were actually sharpening my thoughts.
I fell to my knees and started grovelling around on the floor, looking for the ring. Proffering apologies, I crawled between the legs of diners, moving handbags aside, my nostrils filled with the scent of expensive leather shoes. But no damned ring.
After ten minutes, and numerous apologies, I admitted temporary defeat and sat back down, thinking hard, wondering if she had dropped it out in the street, perhaps?
If so, the chances of it still being there were slim. As I was pondering, a glint of light struck my eyes. To my astonishment, I saw the ape who had first collided with Maria seated at the next table. He was holding a sparkly object in his fingers, examining it.
It was Maria’s ring! I was as certain as I could be of anything.
And while I stared, he and his companion, another ape in a vulgar suit, stood up and walked past me, heading quickly towards the exit.
I jumped up from my chair. ‘Excuse me!’ I called after him.
But I got trapped in the narrow gulley between the tables by a waiter with a massive tray of drinks. By the time I had squeezed past him, both apes had walked through the crowd of people hovering around the entrance, waiting either for their coats or their tables, and were heading out through the front door.
As I reached the door, a tall, smiling man all in black stepped into my path.
‘Your bill, sir?’ he asked.
‘It’s been... it’s settled — on Maria Andropoulos’s account.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, with a perfectly formed and delivered smile. ‘People do not have accounts here.’
‘But she... she said...’ I stared at him bewildered, realizing she must have forgotten in all the chaos surrounding her departure, and stared at the doors swinging closed behind the apes and my fast vanishing £10,000 reward.
I pulled out my one remaining live credit card, thrust it into his hand, told him I would be back in a moment, and threw myself out of the door and past the liveried doorman outside, looking frantically each way down Piccadilly. Then I saw them, walking along the pavement, a short distance away.
I ran after them and caught them up. ‘Hallo,’ I said, a tad breathlessly, to the ape in the white polo neck. He was six-feet-four inches of muscle and gristle, with a complexion like the wrong side of the moon, and an expression I already, very seriously, did not like.
‘I think you just picked up the ring a friend of mine dropped.’
They stopped in their tracks. White polo neck asked me, ‘Do you have dental insurance?’
‘Dental insurance?’ I replied, puzzled.
‘Yes,’ he said, in an East End accent. ‘Because if you don’t fuck off, you’re going to need it.’
I don’t actually know where I got the strength from — but I stood my ground, doubtless driven by desperation. ‘I’ve been asked to offer a reward of £2,000 for that ring by my friend who lost it,’ I blurted.
For a long moment I thought he was going to drive my teeth so far down my throat that I would need the services of a proctologist. But then I realized from his expression that he was actually considering my offer.
He pulled the ring out of his pocket and held it up. The other ape nodded thoughtfully.
‘I don’t know much about rings,’ polo neck said, ‘but I would guess this has to be three grand.’
‘Two and a half,’ I blurted.
‘OK,’ he relented, to my joy. ‘Two thousand, five hundred pounds.’
The next half hour was totally surreal. I found myself in a taxi with these two apes, which I had to pay for, naturally, driving to a pawnbroker that polo neck appeared to know in High Holborn. I cashed in my watch for a lousy £2,500 exactly, handed him the cash, took the ring and jumped into another cab, heading straight back to the Wolseley. I paid the bill — a whopping £425 including tip, which, miraculously, my credit card withstood — then waited another hour in a Starbucks down the road, giving my beloved Maria time to finish her speech, before dialling the number on the card she had given me.
I got an automated response, from a curt sounding lady, which said, ‘The number you have called is not recognized. Please check the number. If you need help, call the operator.’
I called the operator. The number on Maria Andropoulos’s business card was incorrect.
Puzzled, I rang the Savoy hotel and asked to speak to Maria Andropoulos who had been making a speech at the Women Against Poverty charity function at the hotel that afternoon. After some minutes, the very helpful assistant assured me that there was no function in the hotel for that charity scheduled for that day. And the name of my beloved meant nothing to them.
Unsure what to do next, I decided to take a cab back to the pawnbroker. The man who ran it had seemed extremely pleasant, albeit on the mean side. He scrutinized the ring with one of those curious monocles I had only ever seen in films.
Then he smiled and shook his head. ‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked.
‘A friend,’ I replied.
He looked at me with deep suspicion which implied, First a Rolex, now this. Then he floored me.
‘It’s worthless,’ he said. ‘Costume jewellery. This is what you’d get in a Christmas cracker. I wouldn’t even give you a quid for this.’
A twenty-pound cab ride later, a jeweller in a shop in Old Bond Street confirmed what I had been told.
I have a postscript to add to this sorry tale. It was five years later, and I was divorced, still eking a living out of flogging tax schemes. I emerged from Knightsbridge underground station and was walking past Harvey Nichols, a store that, in my financial position, there was no point in even thinking about entering, when a black S-Class Mercedes pulled up to the kerb. From the rear, Maria Andropoulos and the ape in the polo neck emerged.
Both of them saw me, and I stopped in my tracks.
‘Dahlink!’ she said, thrusting out her hand as if greeting a dear and long-lost friend. ‘My dahlink Sebastian! How are you?’
Before I could even muster a reply, the ape pulled back the cuff of his Savile Row suit jacket to reveal a gold Rolex.
My gold Rolex.
‘We’re late,’ he said to her, glancing at me as if I was part of the flotsam of London’s streets that people in S-Class Mercedes-Benz cars were well removed from.
And he was right, of course.
Christmas Is for the Kids
Kate saw him standing at the Tesco checkout and presumed he was with his mother. The store was quiet. It was Christmas Eve, the last hour of shopping.
The doors opened and a loop of tinsel swayed in the draught. ‘Silent Night’ echoed around the darkening car park. The queue moved forward and the boy tugged his stacked trolley. The woman in front of him was stuffing her purchases into her carrier, and Kate realized then that the boy was on his own. His head barely reached the top of the trolley, and he had to stretch to reach the lower packages.