Another subject for a row, could have been, but he’d refused to rise to it. “Anyway, we’ll see. All I want is a foot in the door and then it’s up to me, innit?”
“Nonner my business, Alex,” said Dave. “But are you sure, deep down, you really want to find this lasser yours? I mean to say, from all you’ve said, you don’t exactly seem to see eye to eye.”
They were bypassing Peterborough. Sod Peterborough.
“I know it sounds like that but as I say, Dave, you don’t know her,” said Alex doggedly. But he took Dave’s point, he had to admit it.
What he didn’t tell Dave, and what he hadn’t told Selby, was that this head hunter story had got a bit out of hand. True, a bloke from Radio Metropole was coming to talk to the media studies course, but no way could he be described as a head hunter, he was just marking their card on job prospects in radio and that. But Selby, for the sake of picking a row, had chosen to believe he was a head hunter, and Alex, for the sake of preventing a row, had gone along with it, to the point at which he now more or less believed it himself.
Another thing he hadn’t told Dave was that he wouldn’t be so much looking for Selby in Soho, although he would certainly be on the look-out for her. No: with any luck, she would be looking for him.
He had told that lass Selby shared a flat with, Vicky, that he was going down to London for twenty-four hours, all the time he could spare, and would be searching for Selby in Soho, where she was likeliest to be. Vicky was in touch with Selby although she denied it, lying little mare that she was, and would pass the message on. If Selby wanted to be found, in the few short streets that comprised Soho from what he had gathered, it should be the easiest thing in the world to make herself visible. If not, sod her. It was make or break time. Put up or shut up.
He was putting Selby to the test, that was the size of it. She’d said she was leaving Leeds “to think things out”. Well, he’d given her nearly a fortnight to do it in, hadn’t tried to persuade her not to go, hadn’t come running after her, but now this was it. The crunch. The Radio Metropole bloke might not be exactly a head hunter but he was a valuable contact and Alex wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip past him by hanging around in fookin London. If she hadn’t thought things out by now she never would.
Of course, he had no proof positive she had headed for London, but if she’d pissed off to Dublin or somewhere, Vicky would have given him the wink. It was Vicky, in fact, who had tipped him the wink about Soho. The pair of them had done a weekend in London before Selby became an item with Alex, and they were forever banging on about this So-oh place and how some prat had taken them into this flash club called the Groucho and poured champagne down their throats. He’d like to get the full story of that one of these days, but he didn’t suppose he ever would. Besotted by So-oh, though, Selby was. Knocked out by it.
“So what you gunner do when you’ve found her, kidder?”
“Play it by ear, Dave. I meaner say, I’m not gunner drag her back up to Leeds by her hair, am I?”
“Just so long as you face up to the chance she might not want to see you.”
No way, if she didn’t want to see him all she had to do was go to ground for twenty-four hours. Stay indoors.
“We’ll have to see, Dave, won’t we?”
“I mean, if as you say she’s not answering her mobile, it doesn’t bode all that well, now does it?”
No. And he hoped to Christ she was answering her mobile to Vicky, that they’d fixed up some kind of code between them, otherwise he was in it without a paddle.
Dave’s tea-time. They pulled in at Scratchwood Services to take on sausage rolls and doughnuts. Christ, he could shift his food, could Dave. The way this trip was working out, it would’ve been cheaper to take the fookin coach.
2
The first snag was that Soho wasn’t on the tube, as Alex was to discover upon Dave insisting on depositing him at King’s Cross with the words: “She might be working the street here, kidder, or she might not, who am I to say, but if it just turns out she is and you’ve done nowt about finding her, you’d never forgive yersen, now would you?”
It seemed convoluted logic to Alex, but unlike the airgun hijacker he could not order Dave to take him where he wanted to go, so he climbed out at the main line station.
Piccadilly Circus was on the tube map but not Soho. Paddington, St Paul’s, Hyde Park Corner, hearder them, but where was So-oh? It wasn’t on the bus map either. To the best of his recollection it wasn’t even on the Monopoly board.
So where was it, then? Alex realised belatedly that he had not the slightest idea. He had never asked Selby, didn’t give a toss where it was, got bored by her talking about the place. Subject of another row, that was.
Limehouse seemed to ring a bell, so did Chelsea. They were the kind of places you read about in the same breath as Soho, but they weren’t on the tube either. Limehouse was on a line that didn’t seem part of the Underground system, called the Docklands Light Railway, starting from somewhere called Bank, but that looked blurry miles away. Come to think of it, Soho was more likely to be up West somewhere, round about Piccadilly Circus, that way. Selby had said as much, insofar as he could recall.
Should’ve asked Dave when he had the chance. But Dave would only have said: “Bugger So-oh, I’m telling you, she’ll be in King’s Cross.”
He consulted an Underground inspector, who told him to take the Piccadilly line and get out at Leicester Square, stupid pillock that he was. Alex took the Piccadilly line and found it had already been to Leicester Square and was now decanting him at somewhere he’d never heard of called Caledonian Road.
The warm May sun was setting over the London Hippodrome by the time Alex finally emerged from Leicester Square Underground. A news-vendor told him, apparently as a matter of policy, that he didn’t give directions, but a kindly American tourist who’d heard him ask the way to Soho guided him along Charing Cross Road and told him to make a left at Shaftesbury and a right at Greek, Frith or Dean till he came to Old Compton.
Neither Greek nor Frith looked promising, they were just ordinary streets. What looked like Chinatown was across the road, at least the street signs were in Chinese and the telephone boxes were got up to look like, what were they called, pagodas. Were there a lot of Chinese in Soho? Could be that the Yank meant him to take a left rather than a right at Greek, Frith or Dean. He couldn’t be sure — maybe it was Limehouse, he’d read in an old Sherlock Holmes story that it was teeming with Chinese and opium dens. But he remembered from the tube map: Limehouse was somewhere else.
He pressed on to Dean Street. A bank, a McDonald’s and one of that chain of takeaway sandwich joints that were springing up everywhere. He wouldn’t mind betting there’d be a fookin Starbucks round the corner. Christ, he could’ve got all this in Leeds without moving away from the Headrow. If this was So-oh, Alex didn’t reckon it. Couldn’t work out what she’d seen in it.
But maybe it wasn’t Soho. He’d bought a map at the King’s Cross tube station bookstall but that had no mention of Soho in any shape or form whatsoever. Soddin place didn’t seem to exist. As he pored over his map, trying to place Leicester Square as a starting point and succeeding only in finding Westminster Bridge, an Essex voice behind him — Alex recognised estuary English, gorrer lot of it at the Metro — murmured: “Nice club you’re looking for, young man? Nice bed show, only one in town. Show’s just beginning and you’re obliged to buy one drink only, two if you want one of the girls for company, and I promise you’ll come out with your wallet intact, it’s cheaper down there than Titanic, I’m telling you.”