Jimmy lives in Ealing. I know, because work paid for us to share a cab once, on the way home from a Christmas do up in Hertfordshire, before he had this car of his. Although we’d been drinking so he couldn’t have driven anyway. We spoke, then, in the cab, about Jeremy Bond. Perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps we should have been more discrete. But we were pleased, you see, that we had got away with it, time after time. I filled out the form. Jimmy booked out the car. ‘Jeremy Bond’ drove it away, his visits to certain places requiring less flash cars than his own. But he always returned it. Except for one night, when he didn’t.
I get the bus to my house, drop off my fencing kit, then get on another bus along Hanger Lane to Jimmy’s. I try to ignore Nicole as she is the red bus and think about how the Maserati will look outside the house. It is difficult though, because once I’m in the bus I am in Nicole which is where I want to be.
As he enters her, she enters him; she penetrates his soul.
‘It was you!’ she gasps as he thrusts.
‘What was me?’ he asks.
‘All of it was you – you are guilty, guilty, guilty. On three counts. And I will tell. I will tell all. I will tell all.’
No! That is not how book four goes. Nicole tells no one. But the bus, it doesn’t believe me. I will tell all, I will tell all, I will tell all, the rhythm of its motor says as it charges along Hanger Lane. I must get off, away from Nicole! When I see her again, it will be on my terms, not hers.
I jump off the bus and it thunders away from me. Hah! I have tricked it and Nicole. They can’t follow me now, not any more, today. I think about what the Maserati will look like. It is probably up on bricks with scratches all over it. If I were Jimmy, I would have sold the Maserati, rented somewhere else, decent. Away from these red-bricked house – red, of course, always red, she is not so easily put off the scent – and into somewhere sandstone or white. Although maybe where he is living has become more decent now, with a Maserati parked outside it. Pushed the rental value up.
I don’t have a plan, really, I realise as I approach. Perhaps I should just say it is a social call. That I miss him. That I’m also now ex-car shop, and I want to find out how life has been treating him. What he’s up to, how he’s earning a living, whether he just spends all his time driving a car, why Adam bought it for him. I suppose I want to doorstop him. I could pretend to be a journalist, researching, shout through the letterbox, hope he doesn’t open up and recognise me.
Yes, there is the Maserati. Not silver, like I thought it would be. But black. Like the sparkly granite black of Adam’s offices. It is an Adam car, after all. I prefer his BMW 4X4. Less showy. More suave. Discretely moneyed. Not like this one. But then, maybe it was Jimmy’s choice. He always was an Essex boy, living in the wrong place. Or a barrow boy, they call them, don’t they? A wheeler-dealer, dealing wheels.
I circle the Maserati, walking out onto the road, then back to the pavement. I don’t touch it, because I don’t understand it, not like I understand Adam. Or did understand him. Before he started buying people cars. Jimmy doesn’t keep it as well as Adam keeps his. There are, as I thought there would be, scratches. And the windscreen needs cleaning – full of dead insects and leaves. That makes me feel better. An unclean Maserati parked on a street with overflowing rubbish bins, pavements full of recycling containers, one for every sort of litter apart from dead bodies.
I stand in front of his house, planning a smile, a greeting.
But then my plans disappear. Because in the front room, through the window, I see Adam.