Intermission

by Graham Hurley

  ‘And you’ve been where?’

  ‘Portsmouth.’

  ‘Portsmouth?’ She’s looking at me full-face now, horrified, and for a moment I’m anticipating a citizen’s arrest. On the other side of the street, I’m aware of faces at windows, phones pressed to ears. Then a front door opens and a stout figure in tweeds and a Barbour jacket appears.

  ‘Everything in order, Margery? Need a hand there?’

  Margery, I suspect, would dearly love to take me into custody but dare not risk bodily contact. To spare us both any further angst, I shoot her a bright smile, engage first gear, and floor the accelerator. Two and a half hours later, mercifully intact, I’m back in Holland Park.

  On the journey north, I’ve deliberately resisted checking my phone. Now, stepping into my own apartment, I note the texts awaiting my attention. The one at the head of the queue is from H. ‘Phone me,’ he’s written. Nothing else. Just that. ‘Phone me.’

  I gaze at it a moment, and then cross the lounge to the window. From up here on the fourth floor, I can see that the car park is full, everyone tucked up for the duration. For a moment, I’m back in the borrowed flat in Southsea. Who did it belong to? Were they a couple? Had one of them died? And if someone was living there alone, was it a man? Or a woman? Given the evidence, I strongly suspect the former. No woman I’ve ever met would spend countless hours reconstructing the battle of Trafalgar. Neither would she let the place get into such a state.

  Scrolling through the rest of my emails, I make a mental note to phone Tony Morse and find out. Tony has always been H’s go-to lawyer in Pompey and over the years, when I’ve found myself in trouble, he’s been a priceless source of both comfort and advice. He’s also become a very good friend. With his easy charm and beguiling vanities, he represents yet another side of Pompey, and more to the point he’s never let me down.

  Tony, I think. But not quite yet. I bend to my phone again, dialling Malo’s number, and the moment he answers I sense at once what’s happened.

  ‘Your dad’s been in touch?’

  ‘Yeah. First thing.’

  ‘About Dave?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He died, Mum. Early this morning, Dad says. He told me about the place he’s found, the flat where you stayed last night. He’s given me the address. I’m going down there tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because he obviously can’t cope. He says he can. He thinks he can. But he can’t. End of story, Mum. I’m packing as we speak.’

  ‘What about Clemmie?’

  ‘She’s staying up here. She’s worried about her own folks. Her father’s older than I first thought.’

  ‘So, shouldn’t you be with her? Moral support?’

  ‘Of course I should, but Dad comes first.’ He pauses for a moment, then he’s back. ‘Dad says you’ll be down for the funeral.’

  ‘He’s right. But I don’t suppose they’ve fixed a date yet.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Another pause. ‘How about tomorrow? All three of us?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  To be honest, I’m gobsmacked. H used to be a demigod to Malo. When they first met, first got to know each other, he worshipped the man who’d so suddenly turned out to be his natural father. Later that sense of awe morphed into something much closer to love, which is altogether healthier, but I’m struggling to remember a time when circumstances threw just the three of us together. Until now.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I repeat. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? Am I allowed to ask?’

  ‘Because we should. Because we must. Because we owe it to each other.’

  Each other. Such a simple proposition, I think. The retired drug-dealer, the ageing thesp, and their wayward love child all cornered by tiny fragments of RNA calling themselves Covid-19.

  ‘Well, Mum?’ Malo is getting impatient. I frown. I gaze out of the window. Then I stare at the phone. Why on earth not?

  ‘You’re on,’ I say.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow. Probably the day after.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Stuff to do, Malo. You haven’t seen the state of the place. Take a sleeping bag, by the way. And whatever food you can rustle up. Oh … and maybe a pack of cards.’

  ‘Booze?’

  ‘I thought you’d given up.’

  ‘I have. I’m thinking of you. And Dad.’

  ‘Sweet.’ I’m smiling now. ‘That Italian white you know I like. Greco di Tufo? And maybe a bottle or two of Talisker. H lives on the stuff. Maybe some Rioja, as well. Are you writing all this down?’

  ‘I am, Mum. Tomorrow would be favourite.’

  ‘This is some kind of negotiation?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ He has the grace to laugh. ‘Me and Dad banged up together? You know how moody he can get.’

  He rings off after I blow him a kiss down the phone. Another first, I think, the sound of his laughter still ringing in my ear.

  H, when I finally make the call, is blunt, almost aggressive. He wants to know what kept me.

  ‘I’ve been on a mission.’ I tell him about the scary natives in the middle of nowhere but it’s like talking to a deaf man.

  ‘Dave’s gone,’ he grunts.

  ‘I know. Malo told me. And Cynthia?’

  ‘All over the fucking place. They phoned her first thing from the ICU. You could tell yesterday she was expecting it. Poor fucker.’

  ‘Cynthia?’ I’m shocked.

  ‘Dave. You wouldn’t wish an end like that on anyone. I told Cynth he probably slipped away. I told her it was in his nature, ducking and diving all his life. Probably for the best, I said. You could see how much he was hurting in that vid.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s a tough woman. Didn’t believe a word I said. Hurting’s right. We need to keep an eye on her. Fuck knows what she’ll do without him.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘We bury him, say goodbye.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’ He pauses. ‘Malo’s coming down.’

  I hang up without saying goodbye, slightly stung by H’s brusqueness. Like many men under pressure, he has no time for the smaller courtesies. All that counts is the matter in hand. That and the sizeable hole Fat Dave has left behind.

  By now it’s early evening and I have just one last call to make. I find a bottle and pour myself a large glass of Chilean Merlot. Tony Morse answers on the second ring.

  ‘My darling,’ he murmurs. ‘All well?’

  ‘Still standing. You?’

  ‘Third glass, alas, but nothing in the in-tray for weeks to come, thank Christ.’

  We swap notes about the craziness of the times before I thank him for the loan of the flat.

  ‘You’ve been down?’ He seems astonished.

  ‘Flying visit. Life’s a learning curve. If you’re driving, it’s probably best to travel at night. Next time I’ll need to remember that.’

  ‘You’re coming back?’

  ‘I am.’

  I bring him up to date about poor Dave Munroe and he asks me to pass his sympathies on to Cynthia. Portsmouth, in so many respects, seems to be a village and for all his villainy, Dave has won himself many admirers.

  Tony wants to know more about Dave – what happened, how bad – but I quickly bring the conversation back to the flat.

  ‘Who did it belong to? Do you mind me asking?’

  ‘A relative.’

  ‘He? She?’

  ‘Both. Husband and wife until everything went wrong.’

  ‘One of them died?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And now he’s gone, too?’

  ‘Couple of months ago. Massive stroke. Out like a light.’

  ‘And someone cleared the flat?’

  ‘I did.’ He breaks off for a moment and I hear the gurgle of wine into his glass. T
hen he’s back, as charming and playful as ever. ‘I’m afraid I drew the line at the jigsaw. As you doubtless discovered.’

  ‘No more clues?’

  ‘It’s the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson’s the little bloke with the dodgy arm.’

  ‘I meant the flat. Who owned it? Who lived there?’

  ‘Ah …’ The softest chuckle. ‘Maybe another day, eh? After all this nonsense is over.’

  I wonder for a moment whether to press him but decide not to. Instead I ask whether he’d mind me cheering the place up.

  ‘As in?’

  ‘No offence, Tony, but giving it a bit of a clean? Maybe a lick of paint?’

  ‘Do your worst, my darling.’ That chuckle again. ‘Break a leg, eh?’

  FOUR

  That same evening, I treat myself to a mental tour of the Southsea flat, room by room, making a note of what needs to be done if the three of us are to spend any time there. Top of my list is cleaning stuff: bleach, scourers, more bleach, kitchen and bathroom sprays, and something to make the place smell nice afterwards. Removing years of accumulated neglect from a stranger’s final resting place was never on my agenda, but neither was the sudden arrival of the virus. In any event, whatever difference I make can’t fail to help Tony Morse when he – or maybe someone else – comes to sell.

  Next day, armed with my list, I join the queue at a hardware store in the back streets of Notting Hill. Everyone else in West London seems to have DIY in mind and after nearly forty minutes in the thin drizzle I finally make it inside. The business belongs to a cheerful Jamaican who must be in his eighties by now, though he never shows his age. His real name is also a mystery, so everyone I know calls him Benjy. He sorts me tins of undercoat and gloss for the woodwork, plus a big tin of emulsion for that hideous wallpaper and maybe the ceilings, plus all the other bits and pieces like sandpaper and filler. When it comes to colour, I settle for a softish white, mainly to make the most of all the sunshine that will hopefully flood in through the big front windows. Benjy, who loves a natter, is curious to know more about this project of mine, and when I tell him that it’s time to give my tired apartment a spring-clean, he knows I’m lying.

  ‘Bless you, Mrs A.’ His big hand descends briefly on mine. ‘Must be tough in showbusiness these days. One door shuts, eh …?’

  The prospect of becoming a full-time painter and decorator accompanies me around the local Sainsbury’s. These days I know I can rely on Malo when he makes a promise, but I happily load my trolley with a bountiful selection of wines, two bottles of Bombay Sapphire, ditto tonic water, plus a slab of Stella in case the water fails and I’m obliged to start cooking everything in Belgian lager. As well as the booze, I stock up on staples from the fast-emptying shelves: tea bags, long-life milk, tins of everything from tuna to chickpeas, plus dried herbs, stock cubes, rice, pasta, salt, black pepper … anything – in short – that might brighten the lockdown days and nights to come. The only disappointment is freshly ground coffee, which has run out, but I try and make up with a wildly indulgent buy I spot on the way to the checkout. I’ve no idea what either H or Malo will make of Palestinian freekeh, but I’ll happily eat theirs if they prefer to stick to spaghetti.

  Back at my apartment block, I leave the food and drink in the car, together with the paint, and head upstairs with an armful of cardboard boxes. Rosa, my tireless agent, has emailed me first thing and attached a rough-cut from last month’s shoot in Paris. This is a pilot we’re making for a cop series called Dimanche, or Sunday.

  The script tracks a high-profile investigation triggered by a series of spectacular killings, all of which happen – you’ve guessed it – on the sabbath. The first of the bodies turns up without a head. The next has lost both arms, neatly severed below the shoulder. The most recent, recovered from a canal in the tenth arrondissement, has been disembowelled. All the victims to date have been male, young middle-aged, white, and uniformly successful. These are the Fifth Republic’s dream offspring, proof of French enterprise and French virility, and logic would suggest that the killer is heading anatomically south. The next victim, at the end of a month of investigative blanks, is clearly facing castration and the executive producers are gleeful about the audience figures likely to show up for the fourth episode, should a series be commissioned.

  I play a forty-something Commissaire called Danielle Colbert, which appears to be important in terms of the viewership. The screenwriter, also a woman, is anticipating a flood of female viewers, especially for episode four, and it therefore makes good commercial sense to put yours truly in charge of the Brigade criminelle. It’s a brilliant part, beautifully written, and I’ve worked with the director before.

  Nudging fifty, he’s even older than me and we share the same sense of humour. His name is Remy. He’s a big man in every sense: bearded, scruffy, raw-boned. He wouldn’t look out of place on the yardarm of a nineteenth-century tea clipper, which is fitting because he has a sizeable yacht of his own, but the truly wonderful thing about him is the fact that I’ve never once heard him raise his voice. On set, he has a quiet authority that shows in the rushes, but away from the studio he has a real eye for the bizarre, the absurd, and the grotesque. He happened to be in the Bataclan theatre the night ninety Parisians died in 2015, and the image that never leaves him is the moment one of the killers leaned over a dying man and – with a hint of irritation – put two more bullets in his head.

  ‘He had the other hand in his pocket,’ Remy told me. ‘He looked like he was performing a chore. He looked bored. Cool or crazy? Your call.’

  I have the evening to kill before I set out for Portsmouth again, and I settle down to watch the rough cut. This will give the commissioning editor at France 2 all the clues he’ll need to make a decision about the whole series, and within minutes I know I’ll be spending a great deal of time in Paris, once we step back into normal life. So clever, I think. So seemingly effortless. Dialogue to die for. Surprises sprung when you least expect them.

  By the time I get to the end of the pilot, it’s been dark for a couple of hours. I phone Rosa. Like me, she’s excited by what she’s seen.

  ‘You were fabuleuse, my precious. They were lucky to have you.’

  ‘Nonsense. I’m in the best hands, and it shows. How come the French make all the best cop series?’

  Rosa laughs. Good question. Then she wants to know what I’ll be doing with the empty days and weeks to come, and when I tell her about Fat Dave and the flat down in Southsea, she has trouble believing me.

  ‘Thank God you’re back in one piece,’ she says. ‘Got enough to read?’

  ‘Sadly not. I’m going back for the funeral.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘But that’s illegal.’

  ‘I know. Think enemy territory. All the best things in life happen after dark.’

  It’s gone midnight before I’m ready to go. I arrange the cardboard boxes I filched from Sainsbury’s and fill them with my favourite pots and pans, a range of spices and pickles, some nice plates, decent towels, freshly laundered sheets, and my favourite pillow. Carrying all this stuff down to the car feels, already, like a criminal act, a harried Londoner on the run from some nameless catastrophe, except that this interpretation is the exact opposite of the truth. Up here in W4, I’m safe. In Pompey, I suspect it might be wise to take nothing for granted. Even this, it will turn out, is a hopeless understatement, but in my defence I’ve no idea what awaits us all in the days and weeks to come. Otherwise, no kidding, I’d have stayed in my apartment, probably in bed.

  Two things happen next. The moment I get in my car and pull the door shut, a light goes on in one of the first-floor apartments. Undeterred, I start the engine, triggering another light from the floor above. I stare at it for a long moment, then I realize with total certainty that I’m going to be violently sick. I turn off the engine, kill the lights, grope for the door handle. Mercifully, I’m parked in the far corner of the rectangle of spaces, just m
etres away from a flower bed. I make it out of the car in time to bend double and vomit on to a stand of late daffs. I’ve no idea why my body should have ambushed me like this. It’s never happened before, so sudden, so violent, so unannounced. At least I’m not on the M25, I think. At least I can make it back to the sanctuary of my precious apartment.

  Upstairs, I lock and bolt the door. Against the virus? Against some late pay-back from my brain tumour? Against my vigilante neighbours? God knows. I make myself sick again, and then vomit a third time until my stomach has emptied. At this point, I have no option but to get undressed and slip into bed. Curled in the foetal position, I’m back in the days when a scan had found the tumour but treatment had yet to begin. Then, for day after day, night after night, I’d be on sentry duty, pacing my ruined battlements, checking for new enemies at the gate, and now – years later – I’m doing exactly the same thing.

  Do I have a headache? Yes, but the feeling is strange, a burning sensation as if individual hair follicles are on fire all over my scalp. Am I running a temperature? Again, yes, but nothing alarming, nothing that’s going to make me sweat and hallucinate all night, just a growl or two of fever, the way you might become aware of an approaching thunderstorm. Might I be sick again? Probably not, but my bowels are heaving and within a couple of minutes I’m back on the loo, knees clenched, eyes closed, wondering what on earth to tell Malo and H. They’re expecting me to turn up tomorrow. No way will I frighten them with symptoms like these. So, if I’m still going to make it down, no matter how delayed, I’ll need another excuse.

  I try and kid myself to sleep and – amazingly – it works. Hours later I jerk awake to find dawn at the window. My guts are quiet. The nausea has gone. And instead of a prickly mat on top of my head, I have occasional stabs of pain behind my eyes, not thunder this time but lightning. This happened a lot when I was still fighting the tumour, and it makes me a little nervous, but the good news is that – in every other respect – I feel a great deal better.

  I drift off back to sleep. Whatever happens, I tell myself, the responsible thing is to put a precautionary call through to the NHS 111 helpline. If they think the virus is trying to befriend me, self-isolation is the only option.