‘No, nothing like that.’ I looked at Leanne. ‘Though you might wish he had by the time we’re done.’
‘Spit it out, then. Jeez, Steph, it’s not like you to beat around the bush.’
‘OK.’ I took a deep breath. Like that ever made anything easier. ‘It looks like Joshu’s been putting it about a bit.’
Scarlett didn’t move a muscle. She sat, frozen, staring straight ahead, not even blinking for what felt like an impossible length of time. I could only imagine the hurt. She’d been serially let down by every adult who owed her care and love. And still she persisted in loving. I found it impossible not to admire that.
At last, she looked away, delicately wiping her mouth clean of lipstick with her index finger. It was a curious gesture, as if she was removing the very taste of him. ‘Tell me what you know,’ she said, hard-edged Yorkshire to the core.
So Leanne told Scarlett what she’d already told me. Halting and nervous, she got through her story. Scarlett sat stony-faced throughout, sipping metronomically from her glass. At the end, Scarlett’s face twitched once, a momentary lapse of control. Then she was back in charge. ‘Do you know who she was, this slag?’
‘I think I heard somebody call her Tiffany. But I couldn’t swear to it.’
‘Ha!’ Scarlett’s cry was bitter. ‘Not Tiffany – Toffany. Stupid fucking made-up name. Toffany Banks. She’s always wanted him. Well, she’s welcome to him. Come on, girls. We’ve got work to do.’
That night, Scarlett confirmed what I’d believed for some time. She was not a woman to mess with. First, cool as a cucumber, she called Joshu. ‘Hey, babe,’ she said. ‘Are you working tonight?’
When she came off the phone, she said, ‘He’s running the decks at Stagga. Then he’s going on to a party in Fulham. So the night is ours.’
Next she called a local van-hire firm that Joshu had an account with. ‘He uses their vans for festivals and private gigs,’ she explained. She arranged for them to drop off a Transit at the hacienda on Joshu’s account. Then we headed upstairs to the bedroom with a roll of black bin liners. Scarlett threw Joshu’s clothes out of wardrobes and drawers and we filled the bags. As soon as the bags were full, she’d tip in a bottle of cologne or aftershave lotion or one of the other expensive toiletries that colonised Joshu’s half of the bathroom. ‘He always likes to smell nice,’ she said with grim satisfaction as we carried the reeking bags down to the garage.
When the van arrived, we loaded up all the equipment from his studio, his boxes of CDs and vinyl and the bags of clothes. It took us till gone one in the morning, but we’d been through the entire house and cleared it of every trace of the two-timing little shit. ‘Where to now?’ I asked, wiping my hair out of my eyes.
‘It’s on his account,’ Scarlett said. ‘I think we should drive it down to Stagga and leave the keys with one of the lads on the door. What do you think, Steph?’
‘Sounds good to me. You drive the van, I’ll follow in your car and bring you back here.’
‘I’ll go in the van with you,’ Leanne said. ‘Keep you company.’
We both gave her an incredulous stare. ‘I don’t think so,’ Scarlett said. ‘We don’t want the doormen thinking they’re seeing double.’
Leanne slapped herself on the forehead and burst out laughing. ‘Shit, I forgot. What am I like?’
‘Mental,’ Scarlett giggled. ‘Come on then, Steph. Let’s get going.’
It went without a hitch. Scarlett parked the van on double yellows outside the club and spoke to the gorillas on the door. ‘Joshu asked me to drop his gear off,’ she said. ‘Can you give him the keys?’ She gestured at her joggers and muscle vest. ‘I’m not dressed for it. I don’t want to ruin my reputation.’
Scarlett didn’t say much on the way back. ‘I left him a note propped up on the steering wheel,’ she said. ‘Told him to fuck off to Toffany’s if he wanted a bed for the night and not to bother coming back.’
‘You’ll have to talk to him about access to Jimmy,’ I said.
‘That’s what lawyers are for,’ she said. ‘He’s been no kind of father to Jimmy while he’s been under the same roof. He can see his son, but he’s not having no fifty-fifty deal. Nor nothing like.’
A few traffic lights went by. ‘He’ll try and screw you on the money too.’
‘Let him try. My accountant’s got most of my assets where he can’t get his hands on them. Plus we did a pre-nup. He keeps what’s his and I won’t come after him for maintenance.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he did that to me. Toffany fucking Banks. That’s really insulting, you know that? She hasn’t got the brains God gave a goldfish. She makes me look like Jeremy bloody Paxman.’ Then her face crumpled and she began to cry. Great howling sobs and shuddering moans ripped through her, filling the car with terrible noise.
I didn’t know what to do so I just kept driving. After a few minutes, Scarlett began to run out of steam. Her face was a mess of tears and snot. She rubbed her eyes with her fists and sniffed, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s all the bastard gets from me.’
It was a wildly over-optimistic assertion, but I suspect it made her feel a bit better in the moment. Over the months that followed, Scarlett shed plenty of tears for Joshu. In spite of everything, she had loved him and it had cut the ground from under her feet to be so thoroughly betrayed by him. But that night she was determined to hold firm.
‘Will you stop with us for a few days?’ she said. ‘He’ll be round, he won’t take it lying down. And then there’ll be the media. I could do with a bit of back-up.’
I couldn’t refuse her. In Scarlett’s shoes, I’d have wanted one of my mates in my corner. I didn’t realise that supporting her would put me just there. In her shoes.
21
We didn’t have long to wait. Joshu turned up shouting the odds about an hour after we got back to the hacienda. He had to shout because Scarlett had changed the access code on the electric gate and turned off the intercom. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, too wired for bed, when we heard the van draw up. ‘Here comes trouble,’ Leanne said.
The sound of the van’s horn blasted through the dawn. ‘Neighbours won’t like that,’ Scarlett said. She sniffed. ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’
‘I think you should talk to him,’ I said. ‘Even if it’s just to tell him you’re done.’
Scarlett gazed out of the window at the garden with a hundred-yard stare. ‘I really can’t be arsed,’ she said. But she slid off her stool and headed for the door. She turned and summoned us with a jerk of the head. ‘Come on. I need witnesses. So I don’t cave in at the sight of his pretty face.’
Leanne and I exchanged glances. She looked about as thrilled as I felt. Getting between a warring couple is never a good place to be. I had a feeling this was going to be like a Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner film, but without the laughs. So we followed along, Leanne automatically twisting her hair into a ponytail and shoving it through the back of a baseball cap. A minimal disguise, but it had proved effective enough.
At first glance, the scene was mildly laughable. Whoever Joshu had talked into driving him out here had parked the nose of the van bang up against the gates and Joshu had clambered on to the sloping bonnet. He was leaning on the gate, his wrists between the metal spikes that adorned its top edge. ‘About time, bitch,’ he shouted, weaving slightly from side to side. He sounded stoned. Probably because he was. True to form, he’d been drinking and ingesting assorted substances for hours. The only positive aspect of the whole scenario was that it was the middle of the night and the long-lens jackals were all in their lairs, asleep.