I scrambled to lock up and ran after her, hunched, through the worsening downpour. Why is it that hotels and suchlike spend a king’s ransom on their fronts, yet their rear view is all drainpipes, steaming windows looking into horrible kitchens, rusty tubes?
Naturally, my ‘nice secluded lounge’ was thronged. Upstairs rollicked to the thump of some band. People dressed to the nines stood about chatting. You’d never seen so many carnations. A couple snogged in the coffee alcove with the abandoned passion reserved for strangers at a chance meeting. This wore hallmarks of a wedding.
“Sorry, missus,” I said, catching my streamliner up in the foyer as she stood looking about where to go. “We picked a bad night.”
“No night’s bad, Lovejoy,” she said, smiling. “Days are hell.”
Her eyebrows demanded action, so I found us a place in an inglenook, a phoney iron grate with a cold fire. I looked my disgust. Spinning tin reflectors and a threepenny red bulb in plastic, pubs think they’re Designer of the Year.
“Get me a martini, Lovejoy. No lemon.”
Bloody nerve. I nodded obediently, signalled with exotic mouthings to a puzzled wedding guest in the crowd. I’d complain about waiter service when it was time to go. She should get her own frigging drink. I was hired to drive the blinking love truck, not flunkey drinks for her.
I gauged her as a crowd of youngsters tore whooping through the foyer. Balloons ballooned, streamers streamed, dresses flounced.
Upstairs, cymbals crashed and an announcer bellowed something inane to prolonged applause. God, but weddings have a lot to answer for.
She looked different in the tavern’s subdued lighting. Lovely, yes, but harder than her voice had suggested. I’d only seen her in rainy darkness before. Now, she was thirty, give or take a yard. Small but gorgeous. And so confident you could only admire her. Legs you could eat, figure you couldn’t leave alone no matter how you tried. Skin alabaster perfection. Hair a delight—
“You approve, Lovejoy?” she asked.
Sarcasm makes me go red. I must have been staring.
“What d’you want, missus?” The description I’d been looking for: lush, but hard.
“Get me a cushion,” she said, extracting a cigarette from a handbag worth the whole Drum and Fife and expecting somebody to leap forward and light it. A bloke did, smiling eagerly.
She jerked a plume of smoke slowly, pursing her mouth in a way that almost stopped the show, and ignored him. He went his way, dazedly delighted to have been spurned by so gorgeous a creature. Aren’t we daft?
“Get your own frigging cushion,” I heard myself say, and thought, oh, God. Now a bad report to Gazza.
She looked at me—actually at, as opposed to including me in the scenery. She did the woman’s no-smile hilarity, the appraising gaze that makes you feel a prat.
“I meant, er, what do you want, lady?”
Driving Gazza’s Tryste vehicles can be a real pain. He has three of the damned things. They’re known among us by a crude double nickname—the first word rhymes with truck. You can land right in the mire. Reason: the course of true love does not run smooth. Whoever said that knew a thing or two. The last time I’d driven for Gazza was to a beach near Brancaster. The lovers inside had had a terrible fight—the woman a black eye, bleeding nose, the bloke scratched to blazes. Both had appealed to me in yells and screams to judge the rightness of their separate causes. The police wahwahs had come. A right shambles, me declining any knowledge of the battling lovers. Luckily, Gazza has an understanding with the chief constable, so all was smooth bribery and corruption. Gazza blamed me and didn’t pay me, the swine. Tonight’s success was my attempt to show new-found efficiency, and I needed the money.
“What happened in the barn, Lovejoy. I’m intrigued.” A direct order. Tell, or else.
“It’s like this,” I began.
“Excuse me, sir. Madam.” A real professionoil suaved up, three trainee slickers in tow. “Mr Prendergast, manager. Do I have the honour of addressing one Lovejoy?”
“One has.”
Jodie Danglass smilingly raised her glass to me from a stool in the long bar. I pulled an ugly thank-you-for- nothing grimace at her, for bubbling me to this yak. She’s pretty, new to the antique trade, with thrilling legs. She talks crudities in her sleep. I mean, she looks as if she might sometimes possibly do that.
Prendergast smiled, ’tache, dark pinstripes, teeth a-dazzle. I smiled back, scenting fraud. It’s the one thing I’m good at, being one myself.
“The Drum and Fife welcomes you! Could I offer your lady and your good self a complementary drink, sir?”
“No, ta. We’re just going.”
Fraudsters have to do the driving. I was interested to see how he’d put screws on me.
He twisted with a smirk. “Could you value the antique painting on display in the foyer? Naturally, the D and F would recompense you. Perhaps a complementary sojourn…”
“There is no antique painting in the foyer.”
He gyrated, darting his assistants a quirky tight-mouthed smile. I’d said something he hated. “Did one pause to look?”
“One didn’t need to.” If there’d been an antique painting in the foyer, it would have pulled me like a magnet. It’s the way we divvies are. Folk only believe you if you put on an act. That’s why police look menacing, bank managers dress sterile, judges pretend deep thoughts. Everybody goes by appearances. I should have remembered that, too.
