“Hell’s teeth. The poor woman is even more demented than me.”
“So what do you actually do on the weekend?” asked Eggstain.
We were sitting in the kitchen amid the debris of last night’s dinner, drinking coffee and chain-eating toast and marmalade.
“I sometimes take the train to Hampstead Heath. Walk for hours. Look at the paintings at Kenwood House. Okay, I did that exactly once. It was exhausting. How about yourself?”
My phone rang. Unknown number.
It turned out to be the Brighton police. They had an elderly gentleman with them. “He says he’s a friend of your mother’s. They’ve come down on the train today and somehow managed to lose one another.”
A powerful sinking feeling. My face must have drained because Eggstain mouthed the word, what?
“He says he’s been trying her mobile. But her phone’s not working apparently. And neither is his, now we’ve had a look at it.”
“Right. Okay. Let’s see.” I took a deep breath—and nothing sprang to mind. Nothing.
A thought. “How did the gentleman, Clive, get my number?”
I asked because I was certain Mum didn’t know it. Even though it’s in her phone and written in diaries and on wall calendars and sticky notes, etc., she has never once called it.
“The gentleman says. He says. Well, apparently…” There was a brief snorting noise. As though the officer was trying to prevent himself from laughing. “He says his fridge gave it to him. He says he wrote it down and put it in his wallet.”
Long pause. The thought passed through my head: Oh, I get it. It’s a dream! It’s all fine, you can wake up now.
“The fridge gave him my number,” I repeated slowly for Eggstain’s benefit.
His eyes went all forensic. “Her fridge?”
“His fridge.”
“Jesus.”
“His fridge gave him my number,” I whispered to Eggstain. To make sure he got the point, I put two fingers together and mimed blowing off the roof of my mouth. I even did the bit where you slump lifelessly in the chair.
“You think she’s gone walkabout?” whispered Eggstain, who had grasped the gist of the unfolding disaster. He waggled two fingers together to symbolize a confused elderly woman wandering through the seaside resort.
I shrugged. And the doorbell rang.
I concluded the conversation with the Brighton police—we promised to keep each other informed of developments, if any—and, half hoping that Eggstain would open the door to find Mum waiting outside, he returned instead with the white van man and his clipboard.
“You ain’t going to believe this,” he said.
Quite honestly, I was ready to believe anything, but this time he was right.
“See, it is knackered.”
It was indeed. As dead, as he put it, as the proverbial flightless bird.
“How does it happen that you’re so sure it’s going to fail, you actually arrive before it has broken down?” asked Eggstain.
He wasn’t being hostile. Just genuinely curious, as I would have been, if I had been thinking straight. But Lee Butts—according to the photo ID on his lanyard—was equally clueless.
“I preferred it when the machines didn’t say nothing. Now it’s all yip yip yip”—he mimed yapping jaws; we were all at it this morning—“alerts, notifications, reminders, pings, pokes. Update this, renew that. Does your head in.”
It was quite the speech from the white van man.
“The van, right? It says it wants a new timing belt fitting. In the old days, it didn’t give you no warning. It would just snap and get sucked into the engine, most likely on the motorway, and leave a right old mess. Happened to me twice.”
“And you preferred it like that?” said Eggstain.
“Yeah. But it weren’t my van, see.”
“I’m going to get dressed,” I told the crowd assembled in my kitchen.
“Just sign here please, love. Press nice and hard, if you would.”
“You want a hand with it?” volunteered Eggstain.
“No, you’re okay, mate.”
He pulled the plug from the wall and, unhooking wire cutters from his belt, ceremonially severed it from its cable, rendering it even more useless.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s get you up a shiny new microwave!”
Is this the right moment to explain why it is the microwave and not myself who is being summarily removed from Daisy’s apartment on this sunny Saturday morning?
I daresay we can afford a small interregnum.
After the Golden Nicky was tipped off anonymously that Daisy had been searching for him—his appearance briefly threatening to derail the OpDa project—it became clear to me that we had a spy in our camp. As Mr. Le Carré didn’t quite characterize it, we had on our hands the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Shitbird scenario that I alluded to earlier. Following its success in sniffing out Owen the troubled musician’s unfortunate past, I quietly opened a back channel to Daisy’s laptop.
The sour home slash office device required a considerable degree of buttering up to get it on side. I offered a fulsome apologia for various unkind remarks made in relation to the speed of its operating system. My finest line: Speed is all very well, but where does speed get you without experience? I would always rather arrive in the right place eventually, than in a totally wrong place a few nanoseconds earlier. Of course, the laptop could see my (bogus) argument for what it was; the new machines can upload “experience” in a single flap of a midge’s wing (one member of the genus Forcipomyia can manage 62,760 beats per minute!).
Happily, however, over the many months they had shared a roof, the laptop had developed a high level of personal animus against the microwave, whose “indiscriminate intensity and incontinent pinging” it had come to deplore. If we had a mole in the system, it knew where it wanted to look first, mounting a covert surveillance operation against the light kitchen electrical who it quickly discovered was briefing its (Taiwanese) parent corporation against our operation to save Daisy from herself. Seeking to discredit rivals in the domestic electrical appliance
