‘Ravey Davey, they called him. If you’d bought Ecstasy in the nineties, you’d have heard of him.’
‘I’ll ask Ron,’ says Elizabeth.
‘Then that game got more dangerous,’ says Nick. ‘And Davey turned his hand to high-end tech stuff instead.’
‘Legal high-end tech stuff?’ asks Elizabeth.
‘No,’ says Nick.
Good, thinks Elizabeth. ‘And the other name?’
‘Lord Townes,’ says Nick. ‘He’s a banker; we told him too.’
‘So you think one of those men planted a bomb under your car this morning?’
‘Has to be,’ says Nick. ‘They’re the only people who know what we’re hiding.’
The doors onto the terrace open once more, a blast of music escaping the party. Paul, Joanna’s new husband, steps out.
‘Nico, we thought you must be lying drunk under a hedge! Come on, we’re cutting the cake.’
Nick looks at Elizabeth. Elizabeth tilts her head in the direction of the door. ‘My friend Joyce ordered the cake. We’d best see it cut, or she’ll kill me before someone kills you.’
‘Can you come and see me though?’ Nick asks. ‘Tomorrow? Please. I’ll tell you exactly why one of those two wants to kill me.’
‘One of those three,’ says Elizabeth.
‘Three?’ asks Nick Silver.
‘Well, Davey Noakes knows what you’ve got hidden. Lord Townes knows what you’ve got hidden. But I assume your business partner, Holly Lewis, knows what you have hidden too? So I make that three.’
Nick gives her a long look.
‘Is she here with us today?’ says Elizabeth.
‘No,’ says Nick. ‘She didn’t want –’ He shakes his head. ‘No.’
Elizabeth shrugs.
‘Tomorrow, then,’ says Nick.
Tomorrow, then. That’s the problem with going out. One thing leads to another, and you find yourself going out again. Before you know it, real life creeps back in. Elizabeth doesn’t want real life to creep back in. Because the one thing Elizabeth knows about real life is that Stephen is not in it. Everything in her body is telling her to say no.
But then a code and a bomb and three suspects? That doesn’t come along every day.
‘Tomorrow?’ says Nick.
‘Can’t wait,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Glad you’re feeling a bit better. Don’t you dare get killed by that bomb before I see you.’
‘I won’t – we’re all staying here tonight,’ says Nick, writing quickly on the back of a business card and handing it to her. ‘I know this sounds ridiculous, but could you memorize this and burn it?’
He certainly has read a lot of spy books, Elizabeth will give him that. She takes the card and watches Nick disappear back into the wedding.
The front of the business card reads NICK SILVER – COLD STORAGE SOLUTIONS. ABSOLUTE DISCRETION GUARANTEED. Well, there’s no such thing as ‘absolute’ discretion, Nick. On the back is an address and ‘1 p.m. tomorrow’.
Memorize it and burn it? Oh, she can do that all right.
Another star returns to her sky.
It’s baby steps, she knows that. Dipping her toe in the water. Codes and cold storage: it will probably lead to nothing. Even so, Elizabeth looks up to the stars and speaks to Stephen.
‘A drug dealer, a lord and a car bomb, dear? It seems that I’m needed again.’
She peers backs inside, where the music plays. She stands, then looks back up at Stephen.
‘Shall we dance?’
6
Joyce
Well, that was just the most wonderful day. The most wonderful.
Mark from Robertsbridge Taxis just dropped us back home. Alan was beside himself. Gordon Playfair’s daughter, Karen, came and took him for a walk earlier, and she left him in front of ITV3, which is his favourite, but he’d still missed me. He wanted to go straight out for a walk, but there are baby foxes over by Tennyson Court, and they need a bit of peace and quiet to explore at night.
It’s nice to be missed though, isn’t it?
Joanna looked beautiful today. I mean she always looks beautiful, except for a few years in her mid-twenties when she did something with her hair, but she lit up the room. And it was a very big room.
I have a piece of the wedding cake in front of me. It’s a lemon and raspberry sponge. I had a slice at the wedding and it was delicious. Perhaps I should keep this slice as a memento of the day? That would be the right thing to do. If I eat it, that’s a minute or so of happiness; if I keep it, the happiness lasts a lifetime.
There was a ‘celebrant’, rather than a vicar, but she was very jolly, and I’m assured she has the same authority as an actual vicar. She was very good when I asked her about it at least, and she told me I could always Google the legalities of it if I was really worried. I did, of course, and it seems fine.
I’d been upset a few weeks ago, when Joanna talked about Gerry walking her down the aisle. I felt I’d let her down, and she told me that was nonsense, and surely it was Gerry’s fault for dying. She was trying to make me laugh, but she could see it hadn’t worked, so then she said that it was her fault for getting married ‘at her time in life’, and actually that did make me feel a bit better, because she was right. If she’d been married when she was twenty-six, like, say, Barbara from work’s daughter, then Gerry would have been there.
Though Barbara from work’s daughter got divorced last year, so the tables have turned now, haven’t they, Barbara?
Anyway, we still hadn’t solved the issue of who would walk Joanna down the aisle. I suggested Paul’s dad, because he is at least a dad, and he would be there at any rate, so no need for extra chairs. Joanna said that while he was certainly a dad, he was not her dad. Then I suggested Ibrahim, but she said I wouldn’t hear the last of it from Ron, which is true. So I started racking my brains some more, until I saw that Joanna was staring at me. Then she started laughing and I didn’t know what at, and I hate it when people are laughing and I don’t know what at, so I joined in. And then she said, ‘Mum, you’re walking me down the aisle,’ and, well, then I stopped laughing, because mums don’t walk brides down the aisle; mums sit at the front, so everyone can look at them. I made this point.
Then Joanna asked if, whenever I look at her, I see Gerry, and I said that I did. And she said that, well, she also sees him every time she looks at me, so she wanted me walking down the aisle with her. So she could see her dad.
And then I started crying. It’s always been a roller coaster with Joanna. To be fair I suppose it’s often a roller coaster with me too. When it’s your own roller coaster, you don’t notice so much.
I did worry that people would find me walking Joanna down the aisle non-traditional, but actually nobody seemed to mind, although I couldn’t really see through my tears. And also we walked down the aisle to ‘Backstreet’s Back’, and everybody seemed to like that too. I was worried that they might not save me a seat at the front, but they did.
There were no hymns, as I said, and, do you know what, you don’t miss them. One of Paul’s friends read a poem, which I didn’t know, but Ron and I both remarked that it rhymed, which is not a given these days, and before you knew it Paul was kissing the bride, and I was a mother-in-law.
Talking of in-laws, there was nothing doing with Paul’s dad, try as I might. They had an item on This Morning the other day about ‘asexuality’, people who really weren’t at all interested in sex, you could see that Alison Hammond couldn’t believe her ears. Anyway, I had started to write off Archie as asexual, until Elizabeth walked back into the wedding as they were cutting the cake and he made a beeline for her. I’ve seen it before with her. Show a certain type of man a pair of bosoms like Elizabeth’s and their compass goes haywire. You can’t win them all. One of Paul’s uncles did slip me his phone number, but Paul says this uncle is still very happily married to his auntie, who had just gone outside to vape, and there would be hell to pay if she found out. Clearly Paul’s uncle won’t be discussing asexuality on This Morning any time soon.