‘Remind me again who you’re going to see today,’ my wife said, looking up from the family breakfast table as I prepared to leave for the station. These were the days before everyone automatically carried a phone around with them all day. Once I left the house we probably wouldn’t speak again until I got home that evening.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted.
‘What do you mean, you’re not sure?’
‘Some chap who wants to write a novel about the secret world of bodyguards and mercenaries. I think he works for one of the Middle Eastern royal families.’
‘Cool,’ my son said through a mouthful of Rice Krispies. ‘Will he have a gun?’
‘Where are you meeting him?’ My wife now looked alarmed.
‘Behind King’s Cross.’
‘Where behind King’s Cross?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, realising that I was sounding evasive. ‘He said he would meet me there, behind the station.’
‘But how will you know him?’
‘He’s going to be in a black BMW.’
‘Don’t get killed, will you, Daddy,’ one of the girls piped up cheerfully.
‘Just a minute …’ Her interrogatory glare was unnerving me. ‘Are you telling me that if you don’t come home tonight and I have to ring the police …’ I cast a quick glance at the children, all of whose eyes were now boring into me, ‘and they ask me where you were going today, I have to tell them that all I know is you were meeting a man in a black BMW behind King’s Cross?’
‘Well, when you put it like that …’ I tried an ironic little chuckle in the hope that it would put things back into perspective and stop the youngest girl’s bottom lip quivering so ominously. ‘I can leave you the number that he called from if that would put your mind at rest.’
Needless to say the mystery man turned out to be perfectly amiable and had put together a pretty good plotline which needed to be turned into a full-scale manuscript, but I made a note to self that day that responsible husbands and fathers have to be a little more careful not to alarm their families through sheer carelessness.