Suckers

I handed Alicia her gin and tonic. She adjusted Abigail's position so the baby's head wasn't lolling, and turned her concerned maternal gaze on to me. 'Is everything all right between Lulu and Duncan?'

'As far as I know. Why do you ask?'

She paused, and had the grace to look embarrassed. 'Lu said she thought there was another woman.'

The blood rushed to my head, but then I realized she couldn't have been talking about me. News didn't travel that fast. 'She hasn't mentioned anything to me.'

'I can't believe Duncan would be so stupid,' said Jack, so smugly that I wanted to hit him. 'Lulu's a corker.'

There was another uncomfortable silence. 'There's some problem with tax, I think,' I said, damaged brain working overtime. 'He's been having a lot of meetings with his accountant. Maybe that's it.'

'Maybe,' said Alicia, but she didn't look convinced. I thought I saw her raise an eyebrow in my direction, but I may have been mistaken.

Five minutes after getting home, I had yet another call from Duncan. It was the same old stuff — no Lu, no fun, no future. By the time I'd summoned sufficient resolution to terminate the one-sided conversation, my mood, which had been jiffed up by the gin, had plummeted back into the pits. There was only one thing to do in the circumstances. It was a foolproof method of cheering myself up. I dialled Patricia Rice's number.

At the twenty-fifth ring — just as I was about to give up and go to bed — she answered. I heard a little gasp, as though she were anticipating some fresh new hell, then realized it had not been a gasp but a yawn. I had probably got her out of bed. She was just the sort of person who would be turning in before eleven o'clock.

'Hi there,' I said in what I hoped was a Californian accent. 'Am I talking to Patty? Patty Rice?' I'd decided to give her some more of the weird hippy subcult.

Immediately she was on her guard. 'Who is that?'

'You don't know us,' I said, 'but we sure as hell know you. We were kind of wondering if you'd gotten our latest letter.'

I should have known something was wrong as soon as I heard Patricia laugh. She usually swore, or hung up, or both things at once, but she never laughed, not ever. 'Yes,' she said. 'I got it this morning. And you know what?' She laughed again. 'This time you really screwed up.'

The sensible thing at this point would have been to hang up. But my brain was still feeling like something battered against a rock by a Greek fisherman, so I didn't. I kept on babbling, my accent veering from California to Brooklyn and back again, taking in the Deep South en route. I had never been terribly good at accents. I gave her some poetry: 'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak-and weary, de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum forgotten lore…' I stopped. Something she had said finally sank in. 'What do you mean, I screwed up?'

Patricia's voice quavered with righteous triumph. 'I don't know why you've been doing this, and I don't care, but at last I can put a stop to it. You've finally given yourself away.'

I racked my brains, but I didn't know what she was talking about. 'Hey, what did I do? Use headed notepaper?'

'Not quite.' I could see her smiling in that mean, thin-lipped way she had. 'But almost. You sent me something you didn't mean to send.'

I was impatient, but uneasy. 'And what's that?'

'Oh yes, it must be nice, living in Notting Hill,' she said. 'Shame about all the rubbish on the streets, though. And the noisy neighbours. And the Alsatians. I know you're not really Gunter Krankzeit, are you, it's just another of your poison pen-names, but this time I've got your address and I'm giving it to the police. You're sick. You should be locked up, and I'm going to make sure you — '

I slammed the receiver down on her. Or she slammed it down on me, I'm not sure which.

What had I done to deserve this shit? My stomach lurched as I realized what had happened. I wondered how Kensington and Chelsea's Environmental Health Department was coping with the threatening letter from the weird hippy subcult.

I sat completely still, trying to control my breathing by slowly counting to ten. It was all the Krankzeits' fault. If they hadn't kept me awake, I would never have written that letter, and I certainly would never have been dozy enough to put it in the wrong envelope. I blamed Duncan, as well. I couldn't think why, exactly, but I did.

My first instinct was to march straight round to Patricia's and threaten her with GBH until she returned the evidence. Then I decided this wasn't such a sensible course of action. She might have known, approximately, where I lived, but she still didn't know who I was, and there was no point in showing my face. Besides, she was bigger than me. But I couldn't let it rest. There were fingerprints, handwriting, and, for all I knew, traces of saliva on the gummed flap of the envelope.

I smoked three cigarettes, thinking hard all the while, then plumped for emergency action. Somewhere in the top drawer of my desk, amongst all the spare boxes of staples, hotel stationery, novelty erasers and rubber stamps, there were various old keys I had never had the heart to discard.

I rooted around and found what I was looking for — the Yale to Patricia Rice's flat. I hadn't kept it on purpose; I just hadn't got round to returning it. And the estate agents, embarrassed by the gazumping, had never asked for it back.

Chapter 8

It was raining hard. I wrapped myself in a large mackintosh and set out for the offices of Flirt. It was far too early for the Notting Hill flotsam to be up and crawling, but there were plenty of reminders of the previous night's rumba session: rubbish all over the streets, dog shit and broken bottles and ripped-up garments with revolting stains all over them, a paddy field of old newspapers and sodden cigarette packets. The usual stuff, only it seemed to be getting worse each day. In my head, I composed yet another why-oh-why letter to the local council. I thought grimly that while I was at it I could send a copy to Patricia Rice as well.

Two out of the three down escalators at Notting Hill station were out of order, the platform was covered with litter, and the train was running late due to a signal failure at Edgware Road. It arrived a couple of centuries later, and another couple of centuries after that, after I'd read my newspaper (including the financial, sports, and small-ad pages) and completed all but two of the cryptic crossword clues, we rolled into Embankment station. I headed up Villiers Street, past the entrance to the Foxhole, and plunged into Covent Garden. Since it was not yet ten thirty, the Flirt office was deserted except for a lone receptionist. I deposited my fun package on the appropriate desk and took the opportunity to dial Patricia Rice's number, just in case she'd stayed home sick. No answer, just as I'd expected. She was a creature of dreary routine.

The coast was clear, but the sky wasn't. The rain was pelting down as I crossed Hungerford Bridge. The drainage was so bad it was like walking on the beach when the tide wasn't fully out; water darkened the leather of my shoes until they made squelching noises at every step. Before I'd got halfway across I was so wet it didn't matter any more. I paused and leant against the railing, facing east to where the sky was darkest. Squinting against the rain, I could just make out some brightly lit buildings in the City. I couldn't see as far as Molasses Wharf, but in my mind's eye was a picture of Multiglom Tower, even darker than the sky, a long way beyond Lloyd's, but big and very sinister, surrounded by black flapping things which might have been seagulls but were probably not.