As Duncan had predicted, the rest of that day was hard work. We had decided to address our hot little envelopes to the respective news desks, but Fleet Street was a thing of the past; now all the newspaper offices were scattered around, everywhere from Battersea to Wapping, and though we split the workload into two it took the best part of an afternoon to deliver them by hand. I parted with my last envelope just as darkness was falling. Night-time made me nervous, especially in the vicinity of the East End, so I caught a cab and headed straight back to Duncan's. He made fettucini with mushroom sauce, and we ate it in front of the television. We drank two bottles of white wine and half a bottle of brandy and then we went to bed. For the first time in my life, I felt like half of a couple. It was a comfortable feeling, and I liked it. I had waited long enough.
Next day, Duncan had to set off early for a fashion shoot. He pecked me on the cheek, just like a husband going off to the office. Alone in the flat, I took the opportunity to poke around, but didn't find much I hadn't uncovered a couple of months earlier, when he and Lulu had gone off to Barbados and left me with a set of keys so I could water the plants.
Around lunchtime I strolled home, stopping off at the newsagents to buy a load of papers and magazines. There was no sign of Dino's photographs in any of them, but it was early days. Give them time, I thought. They would undoubtedly want to do some investigating of their own. Then it would be a case of sit back and watch the fireworks.
I settled down to a spot of work — a completely spurious account of what teenagers thought about violence on TV — when the Krankzeits came in from one of their shopping expeditions and slammed the front door so hard that my unfinished Visible Woman leapt from her shelf on to the floor, where her detachable foetus detached itself, and her liver and kidneys fell out through the gap. My neighbours thundered up the stairs in what I took to be hob-nailed boots, then there was a double-barrelled crash as they flung open the door to their flat and let it slam behind them.
Much later, at about seven o'clock, they had a major argument. I could hear him calling her a 'fucking stupid cow' and her calling him a 'fucking stupid Nazi'. This was unusual; normally they yelled terms of endearment at each other. The crash-bang-wallop went on for so long I wondered if he were knocking her around. I hoped so, though I also hoped she would be giving as good as she got. In the best of all possible worlds, they would be beating each other to a pulp.
Unfortunately, Christine Krankzeit stormed out of the flat before it got that far. She pounded down the stairs so heavily that my crucifixes were still vibrating five minutes later. I thought I could hear her sobbing, so I peeped through my curtains, hoping to see Gunter storm down after her and start some sort of ruckus in the street. But he didn't. A little later on I peeped out again and saw her standing perfectly still on the pavement outside, her face tilted upward and her gaze fixed on the floor above. Her skin had taken on a greenish cast in the lamplight, which was strange, because the street lighting was orange. I blinked, and saw that it wasn't Christine at all, it was Patricia Rice.
I blinked again. How could I have been so stupid? Of course it was Christine. Who else could it have been? But she was staring up at the front of the building with an otherworldly expression on her face. I shuddered and drew the curtains tightly to shut out the sight. Half an hour later, when I forced myself to look again, she was gone. But I made sure my front door was double-locked.
That glimpse of Christine had shaken me up more than it should have done. I tried to blot out the memory with lamebrained television, and then, somewhere between the end of a documentary about drug abuse on council estates in South London and the beginning of a new sitcom about Vietnam veterans trying to fit back into small-town American society, I noticed someone showing lots of cleavage. I didn't twig at first; I just saw this figure, dressed in black, stalking down a neon-lit street in ridiculously high heels. The other pedestrians, all male, were going ape-shit. The first gulped down a lethal dose of strychnine — you knew it was strychnine because it said so on the bottle. The second threw himself under the wheels of a Ferrari. The third plunged a knife into his belly, and the fourth was so traumatized that his head exploded. Then Lulu (for it was she) turned to the camera, an enigmatic smile playing on and around her lips, and a disembodied voice whispered, 'Kuroi. They'll die for the woman who's wearing it.' Then Lulu's face faded into an elegant orchid-shaped chunk of black glass, and the voice whispered, 'Kuroi. By Murasaki.'
It was a grand excuse to phone Duncan. 'Lu's on telly,' I said. He wanted to know which channel. I heard him switch his set on, but it was too late; all he got were bursts of canned laughter and the gatta-gatta of automatic gunfire. 'Maybe it'll come up in the next break,' he said. 'What was it for? Bellini?'
'Perfume. By Murasaki. Multiglom strikes again. They didn't waste any time, did they?'
'Who?'
'The admen. When do you reckon they filmed it? Two days ago?'
I could sense him considering this at the other end of the line. 'Less than a week, you're right. They must know something we don't know.' He paused, then asked if I wanted to go round and see him that evening. He offered to drive over and pick me up, which suited me fine, because it wasn't just Violet I had to worry about now — it was Grauman, Patricia Rice, and the rest of the crew as well.
Duncan did the cooking again, but I could tell the novelty of it was already wearing off for him. He served linguini with a ready-made tomato and basil sauce from the delicatessen down the road, and then he fried up some bread to boost the meal's cholesterol-packing potential. We ate in silence, trying and failing to stick to mineral water and staring at the television in case Lulu's ad should come on again. It didn't. The news was full of the takeover of three British companies by a single foreign consortium which already owned four national newspapers and a satellite channel. Questions had been raised in the Commons by Her Majesty's Opposition, and the Monopolies Commission was preparing a report, but the consensus was that there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. It was all very dull.
Shortly after we'd finished eating the phone rang. Duncan snatched the receiver up excitedly, but I could see, by the disappointment on his face that it wasn't Lulu. He listened uninterestedly for a while, saying 'yes' and 'no' and 'OK, yeah', but then he heard something which made him sit up straight. He talked a bit more animatedly after that, said 'cheerio' and hung up.
'Weinstein,' he said. 'She's having a party tomorrow.'
Ruth's party had completely slipped my mind. 'Just what the world needs right now,' I said. 'One of Ruthie's shindigs.'
Duncan said, 'I'm going.'
'You are?' I was taken aback. Duncan disliked Ruth, everyone knew that. He despised her dilettantism and the way she always protested she had no money, even though she was probably the wealthiest person we knew. Her father had bought her the house where she and Charlie now lived, and then he had also bought her an art gallery in Westbourne Park under the pretext of it being a birthday present, though it was more likely some sort of tax dodge. I usually tried to avoid walking past it in case Ruth was there and spotted me, even though she treated the business like a hobby and left most of the day-to-day running of the place to badly paid underlings.