'Hola, Den. {Que pa saT 'I'll give you que pasa, you dago bastard. My world's going down the toilet tit first and you're sunning yourself on some bloody beach.'
'I wish that were true, amigo. I have only just got back from .. .' the Spaniard chuckled to himself.. . 'wherever I was,' he finished. Like Donovan, Juan Rojas had a serious distrust of the telephone system.
'You will no doubt read about it in the papers, manana. So what can I do for you, my old friend?'
'Same old, same old,' said Donovan.
'I'd like a face to face.'
'Amigo, I am only just off a plane,' said Rojas.
'Don't fucking give me amigo, you garlic-guzzling piece of shit, are you gonna help me or do I have to call the Pole? The way the currency is, he's a lot cheaper than you are.'
'If this is your idea of romancing me, I have to tell you, old friend, it's not making me wet between the legs.' He paused, but Donovan knew that he'd got the Spaniard's attention so he said nothing. Eventually Rojas broke the silence.
'Where?' he asked.
'Remember the last time we met in the UK?'
'Vaguely. My memory isn't what it was.'
'The park.'
'Ah. Where the animals were.'
Donovan frowned. The animals? They hadn't met at the zoo. It had been on Hampstead Heath. Then he smiled. It was the Spaniard's idea of a joke. They'd seen several cruising homosexuals, and when they'd walked past one, Rojas had pulled Donovan close and planted a noisy wet kiss on his cheek.
'Yeah, Juan. The animals. Tomorrow, okay? Same time as before, plus two, okay?' Nine o'clock at night. Dark.
'I will be there, amigo, with a huge hard-on for you.'
Donovan laughed out loud and hung up.
He sat in the business class lounge sipping a Jack Daniels and soda until his flight was called.
Vicky splashed water over her face and then stared at her reflection in the mirror above the washbasins. She looked terrible. Her eyes were red from crying and her skin was blotchy around her nose. She put her hands on her cheeks and pulled the skin back. The wrinkles vanished as the skin tightened across her cheekbones. Twenty-nine going on fifty is how she felt. She hated what she saw in the mirror. She looked tired and scared and hunted.
She took a lipstick from her handbag and carefully applied it, then brushed mascara on to her lashes. She put her face close to the mirror and admired her handiwork. Even if she looked like shit, she might as well look like shit in full warpaint. She stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back, then turned her head right and left. Twenty- nine. Thirty next birthday. God, how could she be thirty? Thirty was halfway to sixty. She shuddered at the thought of grey hair and mottled, wrinkled skin and receding gums and brittle bones. Or maybe not. Maybe with a good plastic surgeon and if she ate right and gave up smoking and drinking she could put off the decay for a further decade.
She walked out of the ladies'. To her left was a rank of public phones. She stopped and stared at them. No calls, Stewart had said. Calls could be traced, and he'd insisted that they both throw away their mobiles before leaving for the airport. She fumbled in her handbag and pulled out her purse. She had a British Telecom card that still had several pounds on it. She picked up the receiver of the phone in the middle of the row and slotted in the card, then tapped out the number of Robbie's mobile. It rang through immediately to his message bank and she cursed.
It was three o'clock, so he was probably still at school, and the teachers insisted on penalty of detention that all phones were switched off in class. They were the new must-have accessory and had long passed the stage of being a status symbol. Virtually every pupil now had a phone, so status came from having the latest model, and Robbie's was state of the art, a present from Den.
She was about to hang up, but then she changed her mind.
'Robbie, it's Mum. I just called to say hello. You I know I love you, don't you?' She paused, as if expecting an answer.
'I am so sorry about what happened, love, I really am. If I could turn back the clock .. .' She felt tears well up in her eyes and she blinked them back. A family of Indians walked by, chattering loudly: an old man in a grubby turban and a bushy beard, a young married couple with three young children and a grandmother bringing up the rear, all dressed in traditional Indian garb. She turned away from them, not wanting them to see her pain.
'I'm going away for a few days, Robbie. Not far, I promise. But I'm going to see you again soon, I miss you so much .. .' The answering service buzzed and the line went dead. Vicky put a hand up to her eyes and cursed quietly. She replaced the receiver and pulled out the phone card.
'What are you doing, Vicky?'
Vicky jumped and almost screamed. She whirled around to find Sharkey standing behind her.
'What the hell are you doing creeping up on me like that?' she hissed.
'Who were you phoning?'
'It's none of your business who I was phoning,' she said, trying to push past him.
'You shouldn't be spying on me.'
He put a hand on each shoulder and lowered his head so that his eyes were level with hers.
'I wasn't spying, I just came to see where you were,' he said quietly.
'I didn't creep up on you, you had your back to me. And in view of our situation, I think I do have a right to know who you were phoning. You know as well as I do how easy it is to trace calls.'
'We're at the fucking airport, Stewart. We've left the car outside. He's going to know we were here, so one call isn't going to make a difference.'
'That depends on who you called.'
'I didn't call Den, if that's what you're worried about.'
'I'm not worried, I just want to know, that's all.'
She glared at him for several seconds.
'I was calling Robbie.'
'I told you, no calls. No fucking calls!'
'I wasn't going to tell him where we were going!' she protested.
'Vicky, you can't tell him anything. Period. Okay?'
'I just want to talk to him.' Her voice was a tired croak, almost a death rattle. She sounded at the end of her tether.
Sharkey kissed the top of her head.
'And you will do, Vicky. I promise, but let's get ourselves sorted first. Let's make sure we're not vulnerable. Then we can approach Den from a position of strength.'
He straightened up and put an arm around her shoulder.
'Come on, you need a stiff drink.'
He half pushed, half led her towards the bar. All the fight seemed to have gone out of her, and once she stumbled and Sharkey had to grab her to stop her falling. He guided her to the bar and helped her on to a stool before ordering her a double vodka and tonic. She drank it with shaking hands, almost in one gulp, and he ordered another for her.
As Vicky Donovan was downing her third vodka and tonic and Stewart Sharkey was anxiously looking at his watch, Den Donovan was less than a hundred yards away, collecting his suitcase from the carousel in Terminal One. Even though he was wearing his Panama hat and sunglasses, he kept his head down until he was out of the terminal building. The sky was a leaden grey, threatening drizzle if not an outright shower. Donovan joined the queue for a black cab, and forty-five minutes later he was being driven down the Edgware Road. He told the taxi driver to drop him in front of a small rundown hotel in Sussex Gardens. The reception desk was manned by a bottle-blonde East European girl with badly permed hair and a large mole on the left side of her nose. She had a pretty smile and spoke reasonable English. She told Donovan that they had a double room available and that she'd need to see a credit card.
Donovan told her that his credit cards had been stolen while he was on holiday, but he had a passport and was happy to leave a large cash deposit. She seemed confused by his request, but after she'd spoken to her
