Tara Jones stared straight out of the window and twisted the gold band on the third finger of her left hand and wondered what the hell she was doing with me.
‘Don’t you have to go to work?’ she said.
‘They gave me the rest of the day off.’
‘Because those men tried to kill you last night?’
I nodded. ‘Some guys have all the luck.’
I found a parking spot on Old Compton Street and we walked to Frith Street while I told her a brief history of the Bar Italia.
‘The Bar Italia has been in the same family for three generations now and they have their own secret blend of coffee that was invented by a man called Signor Angelucci who used to be next door and because their Gaggia coffee machine doesn’t have a water filter no salts are run through it—’
She stopped me with a look.
‘Max?’
‘What?’
‘You’re babbling, just a little bit.’
‘I’m nervous.’
She placed a kiss on my mouth. It felt good. Our mouths fit so well. Ridiculously, thrillingly well. I folded her in my arms and when she spoke her voice was muffled against the lapel of my old wedding suit.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be nervous with me.’
We came apart and she slipped her arm through mine and we walked down Old Compton Street into Frith Street like a proper couple, a real couple, and it felt so natural and right and she smiled when she saw the green neon sign that announces the Bar Italia.
We sat holding hands under the large poster of Rocky Marciano that the champ’s widow Barbara gave to the Bar Italia after he died because Marciano had always loved it here. But I didn’t tell her about Marciano’s relationship with the Bar Italia in case it led to some babbling. I kissed her mouth and drank a triple espresso and Tara had a cappuccino, and nobody took any notice of us because AC Milan was playing Inter Milan on the big screens and we were just another couple, lost in the backstreets of Soho.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said. ‘And you don’t know me.’
‘You know me.’
‘What were you like as a boy?’ she said. ‘Did you get bullied?’
I thought about it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was a bit different because I lived with my grandmother. But I had a friend who was adopted. Jackson. My parents were gone and he never knew his mum and dad.’ I smiled at the thought of Jackson Rose as a kid. ‘We stuck together,’ I said. ‘For years.’
‘I was bullied every day,’ she said. ‘I went to a normal school. Horribly normal. They – some boys, a little gang – they said I sounded like a seal when I talked. You know? That noise seals make? They said that’s what I sounded like when I talked.’ She squeezed my hand, frowning at my face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
I wanted to hunt them down.
I wanted to find them.
I wanted to be in a room alone with them for . . . oh, thirty minutes should do it.
‘But it’s all right now,’ she said. ‘So don’t look like that. Smile again. Please?’
‘OK.’
‘It was only a few pathetic idiots. And it made me stronger. Children will pick on anyone who’s a bit different. And you,’ she said, gripping both my hands and shaking them. ‘You live with your daughter. Just you and her. I heard at the office. I don’t know who told me.’
‘Scout. She’s nearly six.’ Tara waited for some kind of explanation. I shrugged. ‘It happens.’ I smiled to soften the words. ‘I didn’t plan it. Nobody plans to be a single parent. That’s the way it turned out. We were left to get on with it. And we did. We do.’
‘It must be hard.’
I shook my head.
‘Scout makes it easy. And it’s not really just the pair of us. There’s Stan, our dog. And we’ve got a lot of support.’ I thought of Mrs Murphy and her family. I thought of Scout’s buddy, Mia, and her family. I thought of my colleagues up at West End Central, who always found a spare desk and some pens and paper for drawing whenever I had to bring Scout to work. I thought of Edie Wren.
‘There’s a lot of people around us who want us to make it,’ I said.
‘I don’t know how you do it. Aaron – my husband – and I find it tough enough with a full-time nanny.’
I didn’t want to hear about Aaron the husband. I didn’t want to think about any of that. Not today. Not in here. So I touched her hair. Her shining, swinging, fabulous hair. I had wanted to do that for quite a while.
‘It needs a wash,’ she said.
‘Yes, it’s a disgrace,’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to step out of the house.’
‘Funny man. I’ve never seen you in a suit before,’ she said, running her fingers under the lapels of my jacket.
‘I got married in this suit,’ I said, and when I looked down at her hands on my lapel I saw that the blue wool was shiny with time. I had never noticed that before. My wedding suit was old.
She brought her face close to mine.
‘You should get a new one,’ she whispered.
She gave me a coffee-flavoured kiss and slipped off the stool. ‘Time to get back to the real world,’ she said.
The traffic was unmoving on Shaftesbury Avenue when we started back to West End Central so I put on the blues-and-twos and everything that blocked our path quickly got out of the way.
‘Oh God!’
Tara sank deep into her seat, laughing with some combination of embarrassment and delight as the two-tone siren howled and the grille lights blazed and London made way.
We laughed out loud all the way back to Savile Row.
And it was only hours later, after Scout had fallen asleep on the sofa reading a book called I Like This Poem and the bells of St Paul’s were chiming the hour that I suddenly realised Tara Jones had never heard the sound of the blues-and-twos.
28
I was jolted from sleep when my phone began vibrating on the small bedside table, moving in jerky little circles as if it had a life of its own. I swung my legs out of bed. Six a.m. and the sky was still almost black. The days were getting shorter.
A woman was crying at the other end of the line. It took me a moment to realise that she was Alice Goddard.
‘They are going to let one of them out! They are going to let him off! Max, he’s going to get away with killing my husband!’
‘Slow down, Alice. What’s happening?’
She got it out. One of the gang who had killed Steve Goddard was trying to get his verdict declared unsound.
‘Which one?’ I said, although I could already guess.
‘The one who filmed it on his phone. Jed Blake. Do you remember him? He’s saying – he’s saying he didn’t take part, that it was nothing to do with him . . .’
I remembered all three of them. The coward. The weakling. And the bully. They had been cocky enough in Court Number One of the Old Bailey but far less impressive when I had first encountered them in Interview Room 2 at West End Central.
I had seen the bully blank-faced with callous indifference, too stupid to realise the enormity of what he had done. And I saw the weakling wet himself at the prospect of a prison sentence.
And I saw the coward – Jed Blake – crying for his mother, head in his hands as if he could not bear to look at the interview room, repeating over and over again that he had not laid a fist or a boot on Mr Goddard, that he had just pointed his phone and pressed record.
‘Listen to me, Alice. It sounds like this Jed Blake creep is seeking permission to appeal. The judge at their trial decided that they were all in it together. But Blake’s lawyer is probably going to argue that his conviction was unsound because they were not all in it together.’ The words stuck in my mouth, but I had to spell it out to her. ‘Because Blake was only filming what happened and not taking part in the beating.’