by Hannah Pearl
Ben frequently reminded us that if anyone stole the laptop they’d be able to log in fairly easily. He himself refused to use it and tended to grumble when anyone else did. It hadn’t stopped him, however, from loading a bunch of intrusive and probably highly illegal search programmes onto it. Maybe he spent so much time running programmes like these at work that he forgot that some of us still had the illusion that we had some privacy left online. I wasn’t sure how much of Cody Rainbow’s privacy I wanted to invade, so I started off with a good old Google search.
After skimming through page after page of photos of American high school students, who seemed to be split approximately fifty/fifty male and female, I was still none the wiser. I opened the first of Ben’s programmes and entered the name, but with no gender or date of birth, I was still left with far too many options. I groaned with frustration and sat back. Unsure what to do next, I stared at the screen until I felt hands on my shoulders. Eli began to massage them, and I groaned again, but this time in pleasure.
‘For someone who looked so relaxed after her bath an hour ago, your shoulders are all kinds of tense now,’ he said. He continued to rub the back of my neck and I didn’t ask him to stop.
‘There’s a new shop opening on the road. All I have is the owner’s name and the shop’s so far. I need to know if this is going to impact on Romantic Daze.’ Eli began to stroke the top of my arms. ‘I can’t lose my business,’ I said to him, finally admitting that perhaps I did have a reason to be nervous about my shop after all.
‘I thought you said you were doing well.’
‘I am,’ I told him, ‘but I always do at Christmas. Then I get just enough birthdays and anniversaries to keep me ticking over during the summer, but if the rates go up again and I lose some of my sales, who knows if I’ll be able to make it through until next Christmas. I can’t lose my shop.’ Eli might not have understood why my customers meant so much to me, but he knew what it felt like to lose someone you loved and he understood why I wanted to work in a building that had meant so much to my parents.
‘So why don’t you find out more about this Cody person?’ he said, reading the name from the screen.
‘I don’t know how,’ I told him, gesturing at the list of possibilities.
‘Use your imagination. How else could you investigate?’ he asked.
‘I’m not a secret agent like you, remember?’ I said, rolling my eyes at him.
‘You could have been,’ he said, and I turned away and began to puzzle over the screen once more. ‘You never looked at your aptitude scores, did you?’
‘I didn’t need to. You and Ben needed something to occupy you once you finished university, and I love my brother but there are a lot of roles he wouldn’t be suited to. I only took the tests so that he would come with us and take it as well. My shop was already set up downstairs.’
‘I got Ben to hack the system,’ Eli admitted.
I swiped his arm. ‘You’d lose your jobs if they found out.’
‘Your brother is the only person who would be able to spot that we’d ever broken in, so the chances are we were safe. Your scores were higher than mine. You could have walked into a job if you’d wanted one.’ Eli loved what he did, though I doubted that I would ever know exactly what it entailed.
‘I know you think my shop is silly, but I love it,’ I began.
Eli stopped what he was doing, pulled a chair over and sat in front of me. ‘I never said that.’
‘You didn’t need to. I can tell from your face whenever I talk about it. You don’t understand why I need it so much.’
‘I know how to make a woman feel good without resorting to generic chocolates and half dead flowers,’ he scoffed.
‘Is that what you think I sell?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer so I closed the laptop lid and made him follow me downstairs. The lamp-post outside filled the front of the shop with a yellow glow, so I left the overhead light off as we walked around. I showed him the necklace that I had waiting beneath the counter for Mr Sellis to pick up the next week for his wife. It was a replica of one he’d bought her that had been stolen in a burglary the year before. The original had been a gift from him on the birth of their second child and apparently she’d cried for hours when she realised that it was gone.
Next, I showed him the box that Arthur and I had been putting together for him to surprise Janet with on their second honeymoon. I’d tracked down CDs with some of the songs on that they’d danced to at their wedding. I’d ordered a bottle of her favourite perfume from a department store in New York, and together we’d been to visit her favourite jeweller where I’d helped Arthur choose a beautiful eternity ring. ‘Arthur was seriously ill last year and Janet nursed him through it. This is his way of thanking her and celebrating the fact that he’s still here to go travelling with her.’
Eli didn’t reply, but as he walked around the shop, opening drawers and running his finger down the shelves, he seemed finally to be paying attention to what I said. ‘I love what I do,’ I told him. ‘I like helping people to be happy. What happens if this Cody person puts me out of business? These are tough times for small businesses. People aren’t spending money freely right now. No one knows what the economy is going to be like next year, and I’m kind of a niche service. In a few years’ time I’m nervous everyone will be tech savvy and they’ll all be able to source their own romantic products. What if one day they won’t need me any more?’
‘I’m pretty sure we’ll always need you, Daisy.’ It was the nicest thing he’d said to me in a long time. Then I remembered that he’d also told me I was beautiful at the wedding. Was he thawing towards me, finally? Did I want him to? I waited in case there was a stinging punchline but none came. He got up, walked over to me and stretched out his arms. I hadn’t been so close to him in years until we’d kissed the night before, but it didn’t stop me from walking straight towards him and letting him draw me in for a hug. ‘I think I get it,’ he said finally. ‘You’re selling memories to people who were happier in the past and need to remember what it used to be like.’
The fact that he truly thought that this was the answer was infuriating. I shoved him away. ‘How can you find so many women to like you when you don’t have the first clue about what we need to be happy and to feel desirable?’ I asked him.
‘It worked for you, once upon a time,’ he responded.
‘But not enough to keep me,’ I pointed out. ‘Not that you were ever bothered about that.’
He didn’t reply, but set the earrings he’d been looking at back in their box and stowed it back behind the counter. He walked towards the door to the stairs but stopped before he headed back up. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘I was bothered.’
He walked away, and I began to tidy up the last of the boxes that we’d taken out when he popped his head back round the door. ‘Also, I forgot to say, the lingerie here is nice, but I prefer you in the red ones.’
Chapter Five
Eventually the anger I felt at Eli faded and was replaced by sadness. Every time I helped a couple to make a special memory for their future, I gave myself the opportunity to keep believing that love could last. It reassured me that one day I would find love just as my parents had, and that health allowing, my chance at love might last for the rest of my life. I wondered if Eli accepted that he could ever feel that way, or that a woman might feel that for him.
Then I got to thinking about Taylor. Love at first sight happened for some people, but I believed that for most of us, love grew over time until neither of you were whole without the other. It didn’t scare me, therefore, that my feelings for Taylor weren’t stronger. It had felt wonderful to dance with him at the wedding. I knew that I ought to ring him and thank him for coming to see me the day before, especially as I hadn’t been able to talk to him properly due to Eli’s public display of machismo, and yet all of sudden I could find a million jobs that I needed to do first.
One of my customers had suggested that I place a
n ad in a magazine that he read for senior gentlemen. He’d told me he always found shopping for his wife very stressful, and that she did all of their gift buying. The only person he had to think of was her, but this placed him under extreme pressure as he wanted to show that he appreciated the thought she went to for everyone else. He recommended that I offer my services as a personal shopper to source unusual and romantic gifts for men like him. I rang the advertisers at the magazine and realised that not only was I far too late to advertise for Christmas, but in fact I only had a couple of days to send them the information I wanted in time for them to include me in their new year edition. Hopefully it would leave me in prime position to pick up customers who were starting to look for Valentine’s Day gifts.
I dusted shelves and ordered new rolls of paper for the till. I even dug out all of my receipts and boxed them up neatly to deliver to my accountant, a woman around the corner who had been doing my books since I first started in return for a new item each birthday and Christmas for her husband’s collections. He had a myriad of interests and it had become one of my favourite tasks. I had discovered a variety of amazing little auction houses where I merrily bid on bottled ships and snuff boxes. The year that I’d found a mint collection of cigarette cards featuring old Doctor Who memorabilia, not only had my tax return been completed for me, but Mrs Derwin had spent several evenings helping me set up savings accounts and start a pension. At the time Ben had teased me for being old and boring before my time, but I loved the security of knowing that my business might provide for my future as well as my present, if I could keep it going.
I’d already sourced a hand-crafted Victorian pipe for Mr Derwin for Christmas and was having fun searching on eBay and placing one or two bids for other items which would be useful in future, when my mobile rang. ‘Have you had breakfast?’ Lily asked me.
‘Hours ago, but I’m about to take a huge culinary leap and make beans on toast for lunch if you want to join me?’ The phone cut off abruptly in my ear, and a second later my front door opened.
‘I brought coffees.’ Lily handed me a takeaway cup before tossing her jacket onto my bed. ‘So when do we start snooping on Mr or Mrs Cody Rainbow?’ she asked, as she pulled the bar stool out from behind my counter and sat herself by the till.
‘How did you know that I was worrying about the new shop and its mysterious owner?’
‘Because living with secret agents was bound to rub off on your somehow. Plus my boss was moaning about how much the overheads had gone up this year so I guess you’ll be feeling the pinch too?’
I nodded to let her know how right she was. I took the five steps it needed to reach my kitchen and emptied a tin of beans into a bowl so that we could eat as we plotted. The microwave beeped as I set it to heat. As the bread toasted, I ran upstairs and fetched Ben’s old laptop. ‘For the purposes of making our research manageable without a trip to the States, which seems to be where most Codys live, I’ve narrowed it down to these five people.’ I showed her. ‘I’m making a huge assumption, any of the others could have come to the UK recently to set up “Picture Perfect”.’
‘We’ve got to start somewhere’ Lily agreed. ‘And if we do need to go to America there’s this shop I’ve always wanted to go to. It has to be seen to be believed I’m told. They custom make movies that you can—’
I threw my hands up over my ears before she could finish the sentence. I didn’t need to learn about anything that Lily had never seen before.
As we ate we took turns to run the five Codys through Ben’s various databases. I suggested that we could safely ignore the fifteen-year-old girl who was in a Scottish boarding school while her mum worked as a CEO in London. Similarly, Lily felt that we were probably safe to exclude an eighty-five-year-old man whose last known address was a nursing home in Manchester.
‘That leaves us with three Codys,’ Lily surmised. She sent the files containing their previous addresses to the printer in my room. ‘Do you want to split up and investigate them now, or shall we go together?’
‘Don’t you have to work?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I broke up a fight over the last copy of a new reality show sensation’s latest sex tape without anyone getting hurt and no stock being broken. The manager gave me a day off to say thank you. Word is that the stars made a fortune off the first one. I’m fairly sure we’ll hear from him when the next one is ready to go too.’ I waited for Lily to suggest that making a tape might be an easy way for me to solve my financial worries but luckily she didn’t. Perhaps I’d finally convinced her it wasn’t going to happen. ‘This Cody is in London,’ Lily said, shoving a piece of paper at me. ‘Why don’t we go?’
I wasn’t sure what we planned to achieve exactly, but I knew spending time with my bestie was exactly what my state of mind needed. Plus it would take my mind off Eli. Who knows, maybe Lily was right and we’d discover who Cody was. I’d be a step closer to knowing just how worried I needed to be about Romantic Daze’s future.
After we’d washed up I texted Ben to let him know our plans so that he wouldn’t worry if my shop was shut at an unusual time. I locked the door and we headed for the tube. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to wear something more inconspicuous if we’re trying to go undercover?’ I asked, for at least the third time. Lily’s leopard print skirt and boob tube were currently hidden under the black parka that I’d insisted that she borrow, more to ward off hypothermia than anything else, but her legs were still bare but for a pair of patterned tights which were more hole than fabric, and a pair of gold spike heels. My own clothing choices of a pale grey pinafore dress and lacy cream blouse were positively modest in contrast, but they made me feel professional. And just a little cute. Even if they too were hidden under a thick coat. There was a bitter wind despite the crystal-clear blue December skies. I took the red stripey elf ears off her head and we were ready to go.
Lily marched off at a speed I could barely match, even in my flat shoes. I hustled to keep up. ‘So what’s the plan now?’ she asked as we got off the tube an hour later on the other side of town. ‘Do we ring on the doorbell and give them a lecture about setting up on your turf?’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘We cut down on the number of gangster films you watch, and then we wait here discreetly and see if we can catch a sight of Cody, work out what he or she is up to and find out whether it’s going to impact on Romantic Daze.’
‘I can be discreet,’ Lily said, leaning against the wall until her coat fell open. A car driving past swerved, narrowly missing taking out a post box, as the driver took in her ensemble. I reached forward and buttoned the jacket up. Lily didn’t notice and launched into a description of the brief relationship she’d had the previous year with a well-known politician to pass the time. ‘I’m telling you, Daisy, if I weren’t good at keeping secrets, the papers would have had a field day.’
‘You got caught on film in a car in front of the Houses of Parliament,’ I pointed out. ‘The MP had to resign. In fact, the last I heard he had started working in a country with very limited internet access.’
‘You have no idea what we got away with first though,’ she said and winked at me.
It was tricky to be inconspicuous on a deserted residential street. The terraced houses were set back from the road behind tiny front gardens which on the whole contained more bins and gravel than they did actual plants. I wanted to peek through the lace curtains of Cody’s house but I didn’t dare in case any residents were to spot us and call the police. An hour later, the soles of my feet were beginning to ache and I needed to pee. ‘Let’s go and grab a drink,’ I suggested.
‘I know just the place,’ Lily said, and led me to a pub around the corner.
‘How did you know this was here?’ I asked her. Not just because I’d never been to that part of London before, but also because it was so dark inside it was almost as though it were underground. I ordered a hot chocolate to warm myself up, and Lily asked for a double brandy to do the same. Her drink loo
ked more tempting than mine when it came. The ‘hot chocolate’, if it could really be called that, had lumps of powder still undissolved floating on the surface. I pushed it away and bought us another round of spirits instead.
An hour later we arrived back at the house, in better frame of mind but a little too tipsy to be capable of melting into the background. Lily hoisted herself up onto the wall and sat there, kicking her legs. ‘Maybe we should go,’ I said. ‘Even if Cody turns up, what are we going to say? Please don’t sell anything I do. They’ll laugh me into bankruptcy. Come on, tell me some stories and cheer me up. I’m drunk enough to cope with the details this time.’
Lily jumped off the wall, slung her arm around me and we walked back up the road towards the tube station. ‘Let’s go. For all we know Eli and Taylor will be wrestling naked outside your shop to win your hand.’
I turned and stared at her. ‘I’m not sure either of them really wants my hand. Anyway, why would they be nude? It’s freezing out.’
‘It’s your fantasy,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders at me.
Chapter Six
‘I didn’t drink enough to be this hungover,’ I groaned, as I woke up to find that my head was pounding. I tried to go back to sleep but it didn’t happen. No surprise, my body was busy complaining about how badly I’d looked after it that afternoon. I murmured a silent apology and hoped it would forgive me with a minimum of further pain.
Lily and I had come back to my flat after our drinking session in the pub and had apparently collapsed top to tail on my bed for an impromptu nap. I shoved Lily’s feet out of my face and sat up. The world had gone dark whilst we had slept. The oak trunk that functioned as my bedside table was covered in biscuit wrappers and empty mugs. We’d obviously had the munchies before we’d passed out too. I shifted them aside and switched on the little hurricane lamp which I’d found at an auction the previous spring.
