‘Divine justice can be pricey. It’s a serious matter. What exactly did you have in mind?’
She stuck out a weak chin and puffed pale smoke. There was too much powdery makeup on her face, like a fillet of fish freshly floured for the fryer. ‘The money’s not important. My friend has her own money. It’s the principle of the thing. Life’s been treating her stepmother too well. She’d like to see that stop. What she’d really like is to see her catch cancer and watch her die.’ The voice snapped and crackled and she looked at me evenly as though in small hope I might be a suitable infective agent. ‘I don’t suppose you actually offer to kill people?’
‘It’s not part of the normal service.’ She wasn’t the first to ask. It’s almost always women who do. I suppose men are used to DIY.
‘Too bad.’ She crushed out the cigarette. It, too, had failed her. ‘I’ve put together some information on the bitch to get you started.’ She pushed a couple of typed sheets of A4 across at me, a photograph stapled to the front. ‘I’ll send you an email in about a week, Mr. God, so we can meet again. By then, I would hope you would have some proposals for my friend to look at.’ She started gathering herself together, cigarettes, bag. An executive woman used to organising things, in a permanent professional huff, not wanting to waste time with me. I had noticed a few of my clients recently wanting to get away from my company. I made a note to change deodorant or at least my shirt. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that discretion is of the utmost importance at all times. A woman in my position has to be careful.’
‘What exactly is your position?’ She had signed her email ‘Ms. Ruth Less.’ Even I had detected a possible nom de plume in that. But if she was telling me who her mother-in-law was it seemed stupid not to tell me her own name.
‘I don’t think you need to know about that. It’s unprofessional. Just call me Ruth. There’s two hundred pounds stapled under the photograph. That should pay the price of your reading the brief.’ Oh dear. Access to office supplies, legal vocabulary – she was giving herself away. ‘Let me make myself clear, Mr…er…God. I want something really nasty from you, something my friend couldn’t come up with on her own and I assure you that’s pretty nasty.’
Now, here you have a problem I’m constantly stubbing my toe on. One of the difficulties of my particular line of work is that wronged people don’t necessarily have to come across as very nice themselves. This is important because we tend to think that niceness should be rewarded in a just world and nastiness punished, so that it overrides all those legalese arguments about right and wrong and takes priority. So now we have to ask whether their perceived nastiness comes from being constantly crapped upon by life or whether it is simply the result of their getting away with nastiness for years - crapper or crapee? She slung her bag over one shoulder, a very feminine gesture. I have never approved of men carrying shoulder bags. ‘I have to go. You’ll be hearing from me.’ And she was off. No handshake. Certainly no peck on the cheek.
I allowed thirty seconds and headed out after her. It always pays to know more about the client than they know about you or want you to know. It’s a crucial part of my deciding whether to act as their angel of revenge or not. She didn’t know it, of course, but she had not been interviewing me, I had been interviewing her and she had not done too well. I, too, have a little money of my own and I only take cases that fulfil my larger mission. She moved off quickly down the shaded street with little pecking, high-heeled steps and the sort of sinuous swaying that giraffes fall prey to when they try to run. In cities, people are walking faster and faster these days. Where once they ambled, they now trot and speed. But my car was parked a little to one side, so I managed to dump the Roy Strong outfit, grab some dark glasses from the dashboard and catch her up as she entered the Underground station. There was a business as she rooted in her bag for the ticket and I dodged past, behind a pretty girl with a broken-winged umbrella, and got ahead and into a nearly full lift, then had to loiter like a sex attacker at the entrance to the platform and pick her up again as the following one clanged open and disgorged its load. Two stops later, she got off and we trundled up the escalator together, across a couple of streets clogged with taxis and towards a datedly glassy building with a sculpture of tormented metal outside. Stein, Fistula and Feinschlong, Solicitors, were on the third floor. That’s where her lift stopped before coming down again - empty. The number of medals on the chest of the commissionaire on the desk said they were expensive solicitors. He was digging in his nostrils, plucking white hairs, having long since given up on those on his head, and holding them up to the light like a winetaster does the new Beaujolais. I pushed the plate glass doors open, walked in and slapped a tenner on the counter. It was a huge and beautiful counter, lovingly sculpted, veneered expensively in thuya wood and someone spent a lot of time polishing it - no sign of veneerial disease. Over my shoulder, the door-closer made a soft farting sound as the commissionaire stopped nose-plucking and looked at me suspiciously through bloodshot eyes, then down at the money and let his eyes linger restfully there.
‘The lady who just came in,’ I said. ‘She dropped this in the street. Perhaps you could return it to her.’
‘Mrs Phyllis Stein? Well, thank you sir.’ He rose tiredly from his chair, medals clinking like an old dog’s chain. Put one hairy paw on the money. ‘I’ll give it back to her at once. Did you wish to speak to the lady yourself?’
I put on the smile of someone a bit simple. ‘Oh no. I don’t know her. I just saw her drop it as she came in.’ He relaxed and grinned as I turned to the door, halo glowing. That cash would be going straight into his own pocket. Chances were I would never be back. If I was, there could always be some tale of slipped memory or misunderstanding.
‘Truly a pleasure, sir.’
***
I was not surprised to find a legal amongst my clients. They have all the injustice of the world rubbed daily in their faces, make a living by it, necessarily collaborate with it. In the long run, legals go the way of honest coppers. Either they come to regard the battle of good and evil as just a sort of computer game, as played by their children on their X-boxes, with no implications for reality, or they get a little vigilantist, correct the evidence here, adjust the course of a trial there, tweak a statement, change a plea. Year by year, the Met plant more stuff than Kew Gardens. It has always been my ambition, and would be my ultimate vindication, to humbly serve a judge. We could do a lot for each other.
The house I was watching was a big, fake-Georgian brick construction with a pointed roof, three windows on the first floor, a big door with lots of punctuation and brackets, flanked by two more on the ground floor. It was the way I drew a house when I was five years old and before architects started building houses that deliberately did not look the way houses are supposed to look. All the other houses on the street were different, fake-Elizabethan, fake-Edwardian, fake-Victorian but jacked up at about the same period by real but fairly quiet money. They were shaded by big, expensive trees – the sort you found in a real forest, not the leaves on a stick the council will pay for - and bordered by trim hedges and soft, confident lawns. Everywhere was well-maintained in white woodwork and they had a neighbourhood watch sign on the wall that warned of the presence of local busybodies. It was a very nice street, a street from the past, a memory of a bygone age when people used to have their initials embroidered in the corners of their handkerchiefs and the evening paper was delivered to the house. People planted flowers at the foot of the lampposts instead of just having dandelions. A man in a smart, grey suit came out of one up the slope of the hill and walked an unwilling Dalmatian up and down the grass verge, sighing and jerking its lead, encouraging its nose against walls and trees to unleash its bladder. His polka-dot tie exactly matched the Dalmatian. I wondered whether he had other dogs for other ties. It circled and dawdled, snuffled teasingly at a stand of lavender, cocked its leg but produced only a few drips before sneezing and pulling him ever further down towards me. Finally, it jerked up a leg against my rear wheel and gushed at length as the man mouthed apologies,