I decided to lie.
‘You inspired me, actually. Your description of this place got me all fired up. So I decided to forget about James and got on the first plane to Rome.’
For a split second I thought I’d got away with it. Then his face darkened. He sat up straight, his hands resting on the arms of the chair as if he were preparing to flee. ‘Hang on, you told me you were broke!’
I opened my mouth to offer some kind of refute to this, but he leapt to his feet. The chair clattered over the cobbles, drowning out my words.
‘You’re the one who’s been following me, telling everyone you’re my girlfriend… Oh, Jesus, you’re a journalist!’ His face was anguished as he remembered. ‘You were just trying to get a story all along, and I was stupid enough to believe you didn’t know who I was. No wonder you couldn’t go through with sleeping with me—I bet there isn’t even an ex in the picture, is there?’
‘Everything I said was true!’ I was on my feet now too. ‘I only found out who you were when I got back to work and my manager told me you’d disappeared!’
‘I have to go.’ He backed away from me.
‘No, please stay!’ I said. ‘Let me help you!’
But he turned and dashed across the piazza towards one of the narrow lanes. I started after him, but the waiter came out of the cafe with my coffee, signalling frenetically. ‘You must pay! You must pay!’
I found a ten euro note in my pocket, slapped it into his hand, then turned and sprinted in the direction Ford had gone. I ran down the street he’d taken, pausing only to look down each lane in case he’d darted into one of them. But there was no sign of him. After a while, I realised I’d well and truly lost him and headed back towards the piazza. Nick met me halfway.
‘Is he gone?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. And I also forgot to turn on my bloody dictaphone before I spoke to him, so I didn’t even record what he said. Not that I managed to get anything out of him anyway.’ My shoulders slumped. ‘Katrina was right, I’m an amateur.’
‘But you found out his manager’s name,’ Nick reminded me. ‘D’you think he might be the guy who was threatening him?’
My spirits rose. I wasn’t exactly back where I’d started. I had something.
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘But we’re going to Paris to find that bar. Ford will have to get a train if he doesn’t want to be tracked, so we’ve got a bit of time. Let’s find somewhere with wi-fi and do some research on this Grady character.’
We headed back to the main area near the market and sat down outside a bar with wireless internet access. Nick ordered pizzas and I got the laptop out of my satchel and fired it up.
‘You’re not an amateur,’ he said. ‘Well, other than that you use a dictaphone. You must be the only journo in the western world who still owns one. But that was smart work back there.’
I raised my eyebrows at him. Two compliments in a row? ‘Yeah, really smart. As soon as he realised who I was, he pissed off.’
‘But you’ve got an advantage,’ he pressed. ‘You’ve already built a rapport with him, and next time you see him you can work with that. If Jane were covering the story she would’ve marched right up and started firing questions at him. Not only would he have run off, but she wouldn’t have found out his manager’s name or where he was going next.’
What the…? He sounded genuine, his words all the sweeter for their favourable comparison with Jane. And there was that crooked smile again, the one that started the tingle in my lower back and spread through my whole body. The very same tingle that’d started up when he’d put his arm around me last night.
I flicked my gaze back to the computer screen. ‘I’m not sure it’s all that much to go on,’ I said as I opened up the internet browser. ‘There’s probably a million guys called Grady from the UK. And it could be a first name or a last name for all we know. But it sounds like he’s calling the shots and Ford is just doing what he tells him.’
Our pizza arrived and we ate in silence as I googled every term I could think of to find a band manager called Grady from England. We were halfway through our lunch when I decided research was not my forte. The best I could find were a plethora of Facebook profiles of pimply teenaged Gradys. And as for Le Chat Masqué, it seemed it didn’t even exist, because I found no reference to it whatsoever.
‘What’s the time?’ I asked Nick, irritable with my lack of success.
‘One o’clock.’
I calculated the time difference in my head and cursed. It was 9pm in Melbourne. I couldn’t disturb Angela again. I tapped out an email asking her to find out as much as she could about Grady, preferably with a photo. Then I typed up some notes on what I’d found out so far and snapped the lid of the laptop closed without shutting it down.
‘Can I see the pictures?’ I asked Nick.
He started. ‘What?’
‘Well, you did take photos of Ford, didn’t you?’ I asked.
‘Of course I did.’ He looked defensive.
‘Well? Can I see them?’
‘Later. I don’t like to take my camera out in public.’
‘You don’t want me to touch it, you mean.’
‘Not with your pizza fingers.’
I made a show of wiping my fingers on a napkin, then held out my hand. He pursed his lips as he took the camera out of its case and stalled over selecting the right photo before finally handing it to me.
‘For god’s sake, be careful. If you drop it, I’m going to have to kill you.’
He didn’t release it until
