She answered: “Hello?
Hello? Who’s there? Danny, is that you?…” But I had nothing to say. I replaced the phone in the cradle as her voice trailed away.
I even sloped down to Fleet Street to see if I could spot her. Then I realised I might run into the lads, and that I would just be swelling the ranks of the spies on her tail. It was getting to be a circus.
I had three pints of beer sitting waiting for them in the cubby-hole. They arrived in dribs and drabs. When they were all settled I looked round their faces trying to judge what they’d found. It didn’t look good.
“OK, what have you got?”
They looked bashful. Then Midge spoke up. “Nothing, Danny. We saw nothing. Maybe you scared them off. You know, when you grabbed that Yank?”
He was throwing me crumbs, and he knew that I knew it. “Nothing? Not a sniff?
How many times did you spot her? Sure you didn’t lose her?”
I looked at them. They hadn’t lost her. The followers – if they ever existed – had gone. I hadn’t the heart for a session with the boys. I was bored with getting drunk. I left my beer unfinished on the table together with the money I owed them, and headed for home carrying my delusions with me like a pack of Furies. I’d lost the girl I loved, for nothing.
I needed to get hold of myself. I wasn’t the first bloke to get chucked, though it felt like it. I was weary, as though someone had drained my blood. Or replaced it with Scotch. So I laid off the booze for a couple of days and began to feel a little saner, if not happier. There was a thin trickle of enquiries coming in so I threw myself at them, even the adulterers.
Usually I find no joy in setting up the evidence to let two poor saps get a divorce. But I was positively enthusiastic in booking the hotel, getting one of Mama Mary’s girls to pretend to be the femme fatale, and bursting in on them to catch them in flagrante delicto. My enthusiasm left me when I found this small adulterer sitting on the end of the bed looking sad and embarrassed, as though his world was ending. Maybe it was; I had the impression it was the wife who wanted rid of him.
I had to encourage the bloke to show a little more interest for the photograph.
I even thought of suggesting he availed himself of the opportunity of one of Mama’s kindest and cutest, though he was closer to tears than seduction. But I got enough material to lay before the judge. It was a messy way of getting out of a loveless marriage, but if these were the rules, I was ready to play by them.
In between cases that week I kept fingering my phone. She hadn’t said never, had she? I’d let things cool off. And now I’d got over my obsession about her being followed, what was the problem? It had been a fool’s logic, or a kid’s. But I never got the chance to test my flimsy theory. The phone call from Eve’s boss threw my world upside down.
“Danny McRae? Is that you? It’s Jim Hutcheson here. The Trumpet.” His soft Inverness accents trilled down the line, and I could see his great eyebrows twitching at me from afar. My heart picked up pace. Was Jim interceding for her? “Hello, Jim. How are things?” I wanted to shout, How is she? Does she still love me? Does she want me back? But I thought that might make him hang up.
“Look, Danny, I’ll come straight to it. Is Eve with you? Have you seen her lately?”
I felt the blood congeal in my veins. “No. Not for a week or so. We had a bit of a tiff…”
“Damn. Look, she hasn’t come in all week, and her landlady says she hasn’t seen her. She said she might try you. Has she moved in with you, then?”
“No. No of course not.”
“I think I’d better get the police.”
“Jim, could you wait a wee while? I’ll come straight round. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I grabbed my jacket and was out the door in two, fear clawing at my belly like a tiger. I kept telling myself there was no connection. Nothing to link my sightings of men following her with her disappearance. No follow-up revenge by Gambatti. She was off visiting some friend. Or she was chasing a lead and would pop up any time.
But after I’d talked to Jim Hutcheson, I knew something had happened. I asked if he’d let me look around before calling the coppers. There might be something I’d spot before a bunch of clodhoppers started throwing everything up in the air. He led me to her corner and left me to pick at the papers.
I sit at her scruffy little desk and stroke the arms of her chair. Her typewriter has a sheet of paper in it, ready for her blizzard of thoughts.
Scraps of newspaper clippings stud the facing wall. All her own articles, the best of her war years. Several are topped with her face in that cheesy smile I used to tease her about. I smile back and feel a stone lodge in my chest. A further pile of cuttings and draft articles spill from an in-tray. It’s like she’s just stepped out to make a cup of tea; she’ll be back in a minute.
I pull open her drawer and rifle through the bric-a-brac. Something solid comes to hand: the black notepad she always carries. Now I know it’s bad. She went nowhere without it. It was her life. I heft it and run my finger round the edges. No one is looking, so I hold it up to my nose to see if I can catch a whiff of her, that particular scent that she said was cheap and anyone could buy from Woolworth but smells only of her. There is something. A hint. A distillation of the past hectic two months. I can’t be sure. I put the notepad back on the desk, ready to open it. Ready to see if something in it could be a clue about how to find her. Dead or alive.
I open it and find a journal, part written in English but mostly in hieroglyphs.
Shorthand of some sort that I couldn’t decode. I flick to the end – her last entries. Some are in code, some in clear. Clear enough. She’d been lying to me.
ELEVEN
What I learned convinced me I didn’t want the police trampling over her life – or mine. Not yet. I slipped the notebook into my pocket and gave my farewells to Jim. He eyed me suspiciously from under those great grey brows but didn’t probe.
I left the building just as a squad car drew up. I pulled my hat down and walked up Fleet Street and into the Strand with the book burning a hole in my pocket. I crossed Waterloo Bridge, not pausing as I normally do to watch the coal barges trundling up and down river. I should have got a bus. My leg was aching. But I needed to walk. And the physical pain was oddly comforting. It took my mind off the one fact: She knew she was being followed. Why did she keep it from me?
I reached home in a lather. I threw off my jacket, undid my tie and made myself comfortable at my desk. I guessed it wouldn’t take long before I had visitors, and I needed to read enough to decide if I was keeping the notebook or handing it over.
The inside page had her name on it: Eve Copeland. She’d underlined her first name and written her office address underneath. The ink was black and was already fading to brown in the early entries. I had seen the fountain pen she used: a gold-nibbed, green lacquered tube, capable of producing elegant calligraphy in the right hand. A present, she said.
She seemed to be using three different scripts: plain English, some kind of jagged scrawl which included some English lettering, and a type of shorthand.
In the early pages – the pages in clear – Eve had jotted her thoughts down in a fine script, all leaning neatly to the right in flowing loops. My old teacher would have given her five gold stars. It was a feat beyond my talents; somewhere between dipping my nib in the inkwell and transferring it to the page, my hand would be taken over by the school poltergeist. Even the threat of the belt across my trembling palms was never enough to stop the inky havoc.
Eve’s pages were lined but unnumbered. She’d turned it into a kind of diary by putting dates at the start of every new item no matter where it began on the page. The entries began in mid ’45. Some pages had several short notes; some in plain English, some in “squiggle” as I called the indecipherable scrawl, and then the coded shorthand. Some items went on for several pages as she drafted a column or took down notes of a long interview. It also seemed to serve as an appointments book, with follow-up observations about some event or person she’d met: no doubt he’s a con man… mind like a sewer (I hoped she wasn’t talking about me!); sweet gentle lady… love to be friends; big disappointment compared to voice; great picture… wish I had legs like Cyd Charisse!!
