…LONDON…
‘You tell me what’s going on,’ said Caroline Wishart. ‘Two bastards sandwich me, take the package. Stolen goods, the one says. Then someone attacks Mackie.’
‘Close the door, will you?’
Colley was holding a plain cigarette in long ochre fingers, tapping it on his desktop, tapping one end, turning it over, tapping the other. ‘I’m buggered,’ he said. ‘Who knows how many people he’s swindled.’
‘Where’d you get the money?’
‘The money?’
‘Yes, the money.’
He lit the cigarette with an old gas lighter, many clicks before the flame and the deep draw, belched smoke, did some coughing. ‘Chalk this one up to character building,’ he said. ‘Some you win, some are fuck-ups. That’s life.’
‘Who’d you tell?’
‘Tell? Who’d you tell?’ He put on a high-pitched and squeaky voice, his idea of an upper-class girl’s voice.
Caroline wanted to strangle Colley, go over to him and slap his face and put her hands around his mottled neck.
‘Leaving aside the pathetic quality of your imitations,’ she said, ‘where’d the money come from?’
He smiled, a pleased expression. ‘It wasn’t actually real money.’
‘What?’
‘The top and the bottom ones, yes. The middle ones…shall we say Middle Eastern?’
It was dawning on Caroline that she was missing something. ‘Well, shall “we” tell me what the fuck’s going on here?’
Colley formed his lips into an anus and blew tiny, perfect smoke rings. She saw the pale, vile tip of his tongue. The grey circles met the thermal from the ground-level heating duct, rose, dissolved.
‘You came to me for help, remember,’ Colley said. ‘You could’ve gone to Halligan, but no, you thought he’d pinch your story, make you sorry you screwed him with your non-negotiable demands.’
She could not contain herself. ‘Well, not doing that, that was probably a big mistake.’
Carefully, Colley rested his cigarette in a saucer, finger-shaped nicotine stains around the edges, looked up at her. ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘your big scoop, it happened to you, you didn’t happen to it. Now you’ve got to produce another one. And you gels, you can’t actually do that, you can’t actually do anything, and once you stop giving the working-class old farts cockstands, once the next little upper-class tart comes along, well then you’re back to writing your lifestyle crap.’
He was telling her something but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
‘Still,’ said Colley, ‘you can always get daddy to set you up as an interior decorator, can’t you?’
‘So what do I do?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Move on, this never got off the ground, no harm done, we just forget it. We don’t put it in the CV and we don’t entertain the pub with the story.’
‘That’s it?’
Colley took off his glasses, looked for something to clean them with, found a crumpled tissue and breathed on the filthy lenses. ‘Well,’ he said, not looking at her, rubbing glass, ‘some good can come out of a cockup. You never know.’
She waited. He didn’t look up, started on the other smeared lens. He wasn’t going to say any more, she was dismissed.
She left, feeling the tightness in her chest, the sick feeling.
One day she would kill Colley. Tie him to a tree in a forest, torture him and kill him. No, torture him and bury him alive, shovel damp soil alive with worms onto his head, into his mouth, watch his eyes.
But she knew that what she hated most was not Colley.
No, she hated herself for being so stupid as to go to him, to trust him.