If I don't hear from you within two weeks, I shall donate the Poe to Oxfam and bin the rest.
Adios, creep
Polly
I'd hit paydirt. Not only was there an address at the top of the notepaper; there was also a phone number. Not for the first time, I wished I'd gone to the trouble of having a telephone installed; leaving the flat to make calls was becoming more and more of a chore. But later that morning, I nipped out to buy a phonecard from the newsagent's and installed myself in the BT booth by the church.
After about the sixth or seventh ring, someone answered. A woman's voice said, quite peevishly, 'What?'
I asked to speak to Polly.
'You've got a wrong number.'
'Oh,' I said, 'I'm…'
'Hang on…'
I hung on. My ear was tickled by a distant buzzing at the other end of the line. While I waited, I read the suggestive stickers plastered all over the Perspex booth. ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE. IF IT'S PAIN YOU WANT, IT'S AGONY YOU'LL GET. THE GATES OF HELL ARE NOW OPEN.
I stood there, wondering why no one went in for simple pleasures any more, with the gathering conviction that someone was standing right behind me, staring with gimlet eyes at the back of my neck.
I turned to look, but of course there was no one there. There never was anyone there.
I was about to hang up and retreat to the safety of my flat when the voice at the other end of the line said, 'There used to be a Polly, years ago, but she didn't leave her new number, oh, apparently she did… but it was a long time ago and, uh, apparently we've lost it.'
'Thanks anyway,' I said, feeling almost relieved.
'Hang on,' said the woman.
I hung on again, and listened to the sound of strange subterranean creatures shifting deep within the bowels of the telephone system; it reminded me of the darkness at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Again, I had the eerie sensation of being watched. I shuffled my feet, anxious for the call to come to an end so I could retreat to a less exposed location.
The woman had placed one hand over the mouthpiece, but sloppily, so that parts of the brief discussion she was having with her companion kept breaking through.
'Omigod,' she was saying. 'What happened?'
My ears picked out the word 'blood'.
I felt a cold draught on the back of my neck.
I was about to hang up when the woman at the other end of the line started to speak again, in a stop-start fashion, as someone dictated information to her. 'She used to work… a photographic darkroom… Gravesend?… No, somewhere off the Gray's Inn Road.'
I asked if Polly was a photographer.
'A secretary,' the woman said.
'You mentioned something about blood.'
'She made a complete recovery,' the woman said, and hung up before I had a chance to ask from what.
A few days later, I had to go to Covent Garden to drop off the latest batch of step-by-steps. These days, it took a real effort for me to venture outside Notting Hill. W11 was fast getting to be the only place where I felt secure, but I made it across town with only one or two unpleasant sensations and afterwards managed to hop almost lightheartedly on to a number 38 bus. I got off at Gray's Inn Road, and armed with the address I'd found in Yellow Pages, detoured beneath a bridge.
The first spots of rain were spattering down as I entered Devo's. The air reeked of artificial pine air-freshener. A curly headed man was stuffing strips of negatives into translucent envelopes. 'Polly Wilson? She stopped working here years ago. Had to, really, after what she did. Oh, and by the way, it's no smoking in here.'
I had no intention of smoking, but instead of objecting to his high-handed manner, I asked, 'What did she do?'
'You don't know?'
'Haven't seen her in years,' I said.
He looked pensive. 'Maybe she'd better do the explaining.'
'Where does she live now?'
'Haven't a clue.'
This was useless. I have up and turned to leave. As I opened the door, Curlytop shouted something after me, but his words were drowned out by the rumble of a passing van. I looked back. 'What?'
'She opened a bicycle shop with the insurance.'
'A bicycle shop?'
'Yeah, I remember now,' said Curlytop, nodding slowly to himself. 'Because bikes was the last thing in the world you'd have expected her to go in for. Considering what she did.'
'What did she do?' I tried again, but he wasn't going to be drawn any further. 'Can you remember where the shop was?'
He scratched his head. 'Somewhere around King's Road? If it's still there. Probably gone belly-up in the recession.'
'Well,' I said, 'thanks.' I made a vague resolution to keep my eyes peeled for bicycle shops next time I was in the King's Road, but it didn't sound too promising a lead.
'Cycles, the shop was called. That I do remember.'
'Oh, very imaginative,' I said, and was stepping back out into the street, when Curly said something that had me glancing over my shoulder all the way back to W11.
'Didn't take any bloody notice, did he, that friend of yours,' he grumbled. 'I told him there was no smoking in here.'
Chapter 3
Sweet little Ann-Marie met a super bloke in a coffee-bar. She was dressed in her best skinny-rib and her most bum-skimming mini and her kinkiest, slinkiest boots in white patent leather with fake ermine trim. The super bloke was wearing a turtle-necked sweater and flared velveteen hipsters and his name was Gordon. She told him she was up on a day-trip from Purley, and they exchanged sun signs, and he asked her if she'd ever considered becoming a model, and then he let slip, not altogether accidentally, that he was manager of a trendy pop group called the Drunken Boats.
'Oooh,' she breathed, impressed. 'The Drunken Boats? Drunken Dreamboats, I call them. That Jeremy Idlewild is really fab, though my friend Mandy much prefers Hugo.'
'Perhaps you'd like to meet them,' Gordon said with a cunning smile.
'Would I?' squealed Ann-Marie. 'The Drunken Boats! They're just the grooviest.'
Graham winced. 'All a bit bogus, isn't it? The dialogue's wrong. And the clothes are iffy as well.'
'He was working on a shoestring budget.' I didn't know why I was being so defensive on Walter Cheeseman's behalf, though I had to try and justify having dragged Graham all the way down into the basement to watch Down There. I'd already recognized the familiar la mort toujours la mort on the soundtrack, but Graham had never heard of The Drunken Boats, and had started to fidget.
'Hasn't your pal got any Clint Eastwood?' he asked. He scanned the nearest stack of videos, reading the titles aloud. 'The Naked Bun. The Cooch Trip. Beauty and the Breast. These sound like good clean fun.'
'I want to carry on watching this,' I said. 'Walter said Marsha was in it.'
'Who's Marsha?'
'She lives here. Ground floor. Walter shot some of the film in this very house.'
'Why? Couldn't he afford a proper studio?'
'This is a location,' I said. 'It's got history. Things happened here. Someone said it should have a Black Plaque on it.'
'What's a Black Plaque?'
'It's like a Blue Plaque,' I said, 'only black.'
'Sounds more like something you scrub with a toothbrush,' said Graham.