Angel on the Inside (18 page)

‘Good one,' she breathed, nipping my ear lobe again.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should be struggling more. Or at least some.

‘I'd like to meet her,' I said, for the want of something to say.

‘I thought you had,' Stella purred. ‘You've been looking at that dolphin on her arse ever since you got here.'

She did the tongue trick before I could stop her.

 

We slipped back into the party with hardly anyone noticing us apart from the five or six women nearest the toilet entrance, who shouted ‘Go, girl' and applauded Stella as she swept regally by, and Michael behind the bar, who made a big show of pulling back a cuff to look at his watch, tugging his beard and nodding slowly as if deeply impressed.

Steffi Innocent, dolphin submerged, was doing ‘Georgia On My Mind'
and playing it well, though I reckoned few if any of Stella's guests recognised it.

Stella was holding my hand and leading me to another bottle of champagne, which had been left unguarded on a chair. I tugged her in to me and said ‘She's good.'

‘Yes she is. And she can play piano.'

‘I want to talk to her,' I persisted.

Stella looked at her watch – a sparkling rectangle with slightly fewer diamonds than, say, Amsterdam – and drank from the bottle before answering.

‘Half an hour here, then we're round to the restaurant. We'll lose a few on the way, so it should calm down a bit. You can talk there. Have a few drinks. Steffi will run you home. She knows where you live and she doesn't drink.'

I knew there was another reason I didn't like her.

‘I'd better make a call,' I said, fishing for the mobile I had miraculously remembered to bring with me.

‘They don't work down here. That's why you're a member,' she said, and she was right on both counts. ‘Come and meet some of my old school friends. Haven't seen them for years. Tell them you're a ... pornographer. How about that? Tell them you've just finished editing
The Illustrated Guide to Lesbian Bondage
. Good, huh?'

‘Good? It's selling hand over fist.'

By the time Stella organised the move to the restaurant, I had convinced various friends of hers that I was (a) indeed a pornographer, (b) a film producer who had had an artistic disagreement with a scriptwriter and (c) the official bouncer for Gerry's, though not a very good one, hence the battered face. What was scary was that all three of these scenarios seemed to them not only believable, but appealing. When I forced my way to the bar to get another bottle of something, my butt was nipped and tweaked all the way there and back as if by an army of crows pecking at some juicy piece of roadkill. Four different hands – and the same one at least twice – groped the inside of my thighs under the table. One of them actually came on to me with the line ‘Chicks dig scars, you know' and looked affronted when I laughed; three of them wrote their mobile numbers on the back of my hand; and one seriously wanted to star in my next movie – and that was when I was being the pornographer.

It must have been something to do with it being a warm evening, a dark club, too much booze and a hen night. If I'd met any of them out on the street, even wearing a suit and tie and tipping my hat and holding doors open for them, they would have reached for the pepper spray.

Steffi Innocent had stopped playing the piano and disappeared into the throng, drinking from a bottle of mineral water. I tried to spot her but failed as Stella began to herd her noisy flock up the stairs and out onto an unsuspecting Dean Street.

‘Are you really taking all this lot for a meal?' I asked when I got next to her.

‘Some of them will drop out because they're pissed, some ‘cos it's Friday night and they have to go out with their Man, some will go out looking for drugs and then there's those who think they've got a nut allergy and all that satay sauce may not be a good idea.'

‘Good thinking, if you're worried about the bill.'

‘I'm not. I'm not paying. My darling soon-to-be-husband is.'

‘So he is rich, is he?' I asked, realising in an instant what a daft question that was where Stella was concerned.

‘For the moment,' she said, with a grin of pure evil.

 

I think 28 of us made it to the Rasa Sayang, but it was difficult to tell. The staff met us with plates of their speciality – cubed orange chicken on wooden skewers with peanut satay dip sauce – and looks of growing apprehension on their faces as the cream of the Home Counties in their best designer party frocks swarmed in like fire ants.

I had already made up my mind that Armstrong was just going to have to take his chances in Soho overnight and I would get home somehow, making a mental note to add ‘Get home' to my to-do list. Having decided this, I ordered a Tiger beer at the reception bar, and by the time I turned around to follow the ladies, all the orange chicken had gone and one of the younger waiters was standing with his knees together and was biting his lower lip in agony.

‘They must have gone that way,' I said to him, but he didn't respond, so I just followed the perfume trail downstairs.

The restaurant had laid out a long table and curtained it with bamboo screens, which were nowhere near strong enough to contain this lot, or protect the other customers. Stella took control from one end and announced that the seating plan would be ‘Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, me,
boy
, girl, girl, girl, yada-yada'. Despite the catcalls and booing and shouts of ‘She'll be nipping to the loo again soon,' she also announced that her ‘associate' Randy was settling the bill, the banquet was on its way – she had ordered everything on the menu at least once but anyone with a serious nut allergy was going to die – and she would get round all of them personally before she sneaked off for an early night.

I took the chair next to Stella's, although she stayed on her feet, waving forward the waiters with open bottles of wine. Most of them just put the bottles on the table and legged it. Down the table I spotted Steffi Innocent, who was either very good at avoiding eye contact or simply hadn't registered me, negotiating with a fleeing waiter for a bottle of mineral water.

I felt a hand on my left arm. Its owner was a small redhead in her early twenties. She was wearing a sleeveless, peach coloured, satin material dress with Chinese or Japanese calligraphy strokes down the front, which showed off the freckles on her arm. Her hair was long and frizzy, parted in the middle to frame sparkling blue eyes (though you can do that with contact lenses), and apart from a pale orange lipstick she was fresh faced and obviously proud of her complexion. She would have been on anyone's shortlist for a ‘Miss English Rose' calendar were it not for her prominent, not to say large, not to say hugely out of proportion to the rest of her, breasts, which strained the satin dress to its limits. I couldn't have missed her in Gerry's; it would have been physically impossible.

Now, I'm not one to gawp, but it took a few seconds for me to realise she was speaking to me.

‘I just
loved
that book you did on lesbian fetishism, and now I hear you're making the film of it,' she said in an accent that would have got her into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. ‘Are you auditioning actors yourself, or do you have somebody who does that for you? I mean, I'm not really a professional – I don't have an Equity card yet or anything – but I'm not averse to a little girl-on-girl hot action, as I believe it's known.'

There was a time when I would have drawn up a contract on the back of a menu and got her to sign it on the spot. I must be getting old, as before I could even think of something to say that didn't involve a lot of drooling, Stella came to my rescue and pulled me towards her.

‘Butt out Charlotte, I need his full attention,' she told the redhead.

‘Oh, strewth, I was only trying to get a rise out of him,' said Charlotte, and her accent was suddenly Australian, or perhaps New Zealander, as she turned away and started to talk to the girl next to her.

‘She's very good,' I whispered to Stella.

‘She's a stand-up comedian, and she could do you and the Hackney Empire with one hand tied behind her back, so don't mess with her. Now listen up.'

Stella talked fast in my ear as I liberated a bottle of wine and filled glasses for both of us. Food came and went in front of us and I got busy even if Stella abstained. I had meals to catch up on and a blood count to rectify. She had only to fit into a wedding dress.

‘I'm going to do the rounds and thank everybody for coming and then piss off, okay? I'll get Steffi to come and sit here and you can ask her anything you like, and I wasn't kidding, she really will drive you home.

‘Now, I've told her to come clean and tell you anything you want to know. She's not keen on the idea, says it breaches client confidentiality, it's probably unethical and unprofessional. And this is from a chick who takes her work seriously. Her dad is a copper, her brother's a copper. She would have joined the Met herself, but I think she's too right wing for them. Whatever, I've overruled her. Management decision, the buck stops here, I'm the boss. If it involves old and distinguished friends, then I intervene. That's one of my principles. I don't have many, but that's definitely one of them.'

Yes, Stella, especially friends who could tell a few tales out of school. Maybe make a speech at your wedding ...

‘Mm ... mm,' I said with my mouth full. Stella took it as a sign of encouragement.

‘Now, I really, really didn't know about this case until this morning.'

‘You've said that. I believe you.'

‘Good. What happened was, I was away and Veronica was distracted so Steffi took the call from this guy Rees who said he was a solicitor, up in town for the day, and needed an enquiry agent to do some leg work in London. Steffi met him, took the brief, and Veronica drew up a standard contract to fax to this Rees guy's office in Cardiff.'

‘Did you check him out?' I asked, testing a meatball dipped in plum sauce.

‘Check him out? He's a fucking solicitor. We get 50 percent of our work from solicitors.'

I shrugged and drew a plate of spare ribs closer.

‘Our retainer comes in the post next day, so Steffi starts work, having assured Veronica that, although she's new, she's up to the task; and frankly I wouldn't have queried that, because that gal went up the learning curve on a skateboard. Plus, the job was tracking this Keith Flowers jerk. There was no mention of you, or the famous Amy May.' She paused at that, but I didn't respond. ‘At least, not then. Now, fair play, she did ask me – just like in passing – about Amy, and I said I didn't know Amy personally, but I knew
Mr
Amy and that we'd had a few laughs in the past.'

‘And you mentioned the flat in Hackney,' I said, real casual, still chewing.

‘I might have done, but point is, I didn't put two and two together until I saw her report this morning, and she'd already faxed it to the client. But, honest, there was nothing in there that could have dropped you in it.'

‘There was enough, but don't worry, I'm not blaming you.'

‘As if you could,' she said, wide-eyed. ‘Now wipe that rib sauce off your mouth. Give Stella a big kiss and wish her luck as she abandons her old life and embarks, whatever the hardships ahead, on a new one.'

I did as I was told.

‘So what exactly will you be giving up?' I asked as she stood up.

‘Overdrafts,' she said.

 

 

 

 

 

Steffi Innocent took the chair Stella had abandoned, pulled it away from the edge of the table and turned it at an angle so it faced me, sat down and crossed her legs at the knee. She used her thumbs to hook her straight blonde hair back from its central parting and pin the strands behind both ears, then she leaned forward, clasped her hands around her knees and looked me straight in the face. She could have been a student waiting for a tutor to discuss her essay. I was glad I wasn't the tutor having to break the news that she had got less than a B+, so I smiled at her and carried on eating.

Her nerve gave way first. Maybe she wasn't that tough.

‘Stella says I've got to tell you whatever you want to know,' she said at last. There was a faint hint of Scots in her voice, but she had it under control.

I spooned some noodles onto my plate.

‘Tomorrow night's Lotto numbers?'

Her expression didn't change.

‘I'm not apologising. I was just doing my job. I've got nothing to apologise for.'

I filled my glass as a bottle of white wine seemed to levitate in front of me. I took a long drink, put the glass down and then took off my sunglasses before looking at her.

‘Your client has,' I said.

‘My client is a respectable solicitor,' she said without emotion.