Parting instructions for a Piccardilly circus
‘Right then,’ I said at the door, overnight bag in hand, feeling strangely short of breath as I fumbled in trouser pockets for car keys. ‘If a really big, grey headed guy with a limp comes knocking on the door, you’re up to speed with what to say?’
‘Yes, Bailey,’ said Penny James stiffly, clearly not yet ready to be civil after our Tickle Toby tete-a-taint.
‘Good. And remember,’ I held up a finger attached to a hand now containing car keys, 'no horses in the house, no blooding ceremonies on the carpet and,' - I nodded at Kurt and Courtney, all but asleep by the lounge fire - 'they’re pets, not foxes.’
‘Ha ha,’ she said without humour.
I made to leave, stopped, turned. 'Oh, almost forgot. You might want to know where you're sleeping, or tossing and turning over questionable moralities as the case may be. Gabriel has allocated you the room next to ours up the main stairs behind you there. I can't vouch for the sheets, but your hounds might be able to tell if they've seen any action.' I made to leave again, stopped, turned. 'Shit, almost forgot. Dog meat's in the fridge, dry food's in the pantry, about half of each morning and night at seven sharp in portions no bigger than their heads, preferably smaller. In fact, if you base their portions on the head of a cocker spaniel, you won't go far wrong.'
'Not a fox's head then?' she asked populating her pretty pug face with what was clearly meant to be a cheeky grin.
I populated my own face with a sneer. 'Penny, what your tribe stick on sticks about your gardens is your business, just give them what's in the kitchen,' this, from the expression she now populated her pug face with, clearly an unpopular remark.
'Are you going now?' she said, one hand on my door, the other on her hip.
'Yes, I am,' I said proceeding to do just that.
'Because I could really use some privacy while I rummage through your personal things.'
I stopped ten paces out the door, turned and smiled sweetly back at her pug face now populated with mischievously unpopular intent. 'Well, I said. 'If I can save you some legwork, you'll find most of the scandal in the bottom drawer on Gabriel's side of the bed. Please look, but don't touch for obvious hygiene reasons. Must away.'
And with that, I left with a car key rattled wave over my shoulder, unaware and unconcerned by whatever daggers looks populated my wake. Penny James and any attempt at friendship for Gabriel's sake would keep. Gabriel and any attempt at marriage for my sake wouldn't.
Forty minutes later, I pulled in ten car spaces along from Gabriel’s Audi in the Hustwickgate Railway Station long stay car park. Less than an hour after that – Hustwickgate being on the main line south from both Edinburgh and Newcastle – I was on a GNER train to London.
During her brief, information-light phone call from her hotel room, Gabriel had imparted one reassuring fact – she loved me dearly. Not the sort of proclamation I would associate with a girl who had just slept with her elderly ex-boyfriend (not that I was jumping to conclusions). Due to my rigid embargo on juicy detail, any knowledge of Gabriel’s ex was scant. His name was Marcus Friend. He was in his mid-forties, a rather jaded, jaundiced and seemingly failed singer-songwriter who had latched onto the sixteen year old Gabriel in a London bar soon after she fled the family home. Clearly she was an innocent, impressionable and traumatised virgin who needed love and a home. Clearly he was a middle aged sexual predator. Gabriel was living with him by nightfall.
The ‘relationship’ lasted two years before Gabriel saw the light, realised Marcus Friend was going nowhere extremely slowly and ended it. After a brief period of reciprocal vitriol, they somehow concurred on the existence of some platonic bond and agreed to remain ‘buddies’. He had been emailing her ever since. Not lovelorn or newsy emails in the main – joke emails bulk forwarded to her amongst fifty or more recipients. Just the usual stuff circulating offices the world over. Joke emails Gabriel then found it necessary to forward on to me amongst another fifty or so recipients. While the bond between them was plainly technological and distant, I didn’t need daily reminders of a period in Gabriel’s life I wished to forget. The more I loved her, the harder it became to rationalise her past.’ Her stock standard response to my complaints – ‘Get over it! Who am I with now?’
Clearly though, if Marcus Friend had more than a passing involvement in the assault on Windy Dale Eggs, why was I on a train to London? Why wasn’t Marcus Friend on his way ‘downtown’ for a bit of slap and tickle interrogation and Gabriel on her way back to North Yorkshire? What possible value could there be in me coming all the way down here? Unless Gabriel was simply giving me the opportunity to hit Marcus Friend over the head with a chair before she called the authorities.
***
My train fare ran out of puff at Kings Cross Station. The frugal option would have been to go underground to Piccadilly Circus. But, right now, I was only interested in the fastest option. Which, as it turned out, would have been the underground. My London cabbie spent more time sitting in traffic jams with a pasty elbow out the window than actually driving anywhere. It had taken two-and-a-half hours to cover half the country. It took an hour to cover a few miles of London.
Gabriel’s accommodation of choice was the Shaftesbury Hotel, Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly, a few hundred yards from the famous neon sign of Piccadilly Circus and right in the thick of the West End theatres, bars and clubs.
‘Okay,’ Gabriel said having seated me on the couch in her four poster bed suite and sat opposite me on the edge of the bed, face fearful and downturned. A jacket lay on the bed, either recently removed or about to be put on and she wore 'going out' attire and 'going out' make up, though I was yet to find out if she had, in fact, gone out. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’
With no eyes to search, I searched the ceiling instead. ‘If I’m guessing correctly, there shouldn’t be any bad news.’
‘And what are you guessing?’
‘Same as I guessed, admittedly in jest, the day this fiasco started, Gabriel.’
‘That Marcus had something to do with it?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded at the floor and she'd clearly had a few.
I leaned in, tilted my head to catch her eye. ‘And does he?’
More nods at the floor, slow and forlorn. ‘He has everything to do with it.’
I knew it, but a bolt of adrenaline still shot up my breastplate. ‘Is that the good news or the bad news?’
‘That’s the good news.’
I sat back on the bed feeling ill. My eyes drove into hers and crashlanded in her knees. ‘What’s the bad news, Gabriel?’
She looked at me and I looked up at her aching face as the tears now leaked from the corners of bloodshot eyes and tracked south suggested that the bad news was going to be a little more than an excessive minibar bill.
'You're going to hate me,' she said with a succulent wet sniff and longing look skyward.
I crossed my legs, hung my head and rung my hands. 'Spill,' I said.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I kind of…might have…asked Marcus to do it.’
