Fools for Lust (7 page)

A few days went by without news from her.

Puzzled, saddened, I tried to phone her at work. Her private line was dead. I hesitated, then decided to phone Mark at the newspaper.

‘Did you get my letter?'

He sounded genuinely puzzled.

‘What letter? Who are you?'

He must have thought I was some madman, some crazy guy with a bad grudge against business journalists.

Not only had my letter not reached him, but he wasn't even married, let alone living with any woman right now.

‘Whoever you are, you've got the wrong man, mate ...' he concluded.

I slammed the phone down before he did.

Felt cold sweat all over.

I phoned directory enquiries to get the number of the cable television company where she worked. How could she have pretended she was married to Mark? It made no sense at all. Made the reservations she harboured throughout our affair meaningless.

The woman on the switchboard swore blind they had no one called Callie working there. Whether under her married name or her maiden one. Sensing my increasing desperation, she even checked through the list of all the freelancers who occasionally used a desk at the company.

‘No. I'm absolutely certain. She does not work here,' she assured me.

‘Are you positive?' I asked again. ‘It is so important.'

‘There ain't that many of us here, you see. I know everyone. Nobody answers your description. Are you sure you're not confused? There are a lot of independent TV companies in the area.'

I had often accompanied her in the morning to the building, seen her from afar walk through the building's portals.

I spent the day being a dedicated private eye. Checking things I should have investigated before. Local property registers: the South London mews house I had first seen her leaving, luminous, was in Mark's name only. Caught a cab to Somerset House to check again on the damn marriage certificate where I'd learned about the Cambridge college chapel. Yes, it was there: eight years ago, maiden name Callie Edwin. Collected my thoughts. Then visited another room in the large official building. And found the divorce papers: Mark and Callie had separated four years ago.

The hole in the pit of my stomach began twisting its spear through my heart. Was her name even Callie?

Who was she?

A million questions whirled frantically through my brain.

But the main one was why?

Why, Callie?

I went home late, torn apart by conflicting emotions. My wife was still awake. Angry, inquisitorial. She had received a letter in the mail that morning accusing me of having an affair. She had repeatedly phoned me throughout the day, but it was always engaged, and in my mixed-up state I hadn't bothered to answer her messages.

‘Who sent you the letter?' I asked.

‘That's not the point,' she answered. ‘Is it true?'

‘Who wrote the damn letter?' I shouted back at her.

‘So it is true,' she remarked.

‘Who?' I asked her again.

‘Someone called Callie,' she said.

‘Yes, it's true,' I admitted. I didn't have the energy to argue or fight.

My whole world had just been shattered into lots of small, desolate pieces and I just had no answers.

In the days that followed I could not summon the will to lie or apologise and my marriage collapsed, while I still desperately followed every conceivable lead that might lead me to the invisible Callie, her motives and her warm body again. I was in denial. Couldn't accept the unexpected and puzzling rejection. Hitchcock stories surely didn't happen to real people. I tried to recall every conversation we ever had, to remember any name that might have been mentioned by her in passing, any clue to her identity or someone who might be aware of her or even her whereabouts. And all these memories could not help invoking back every little thing we had done, the curve of her breasts, the colour of her lips, the feel of her tongue on my trembling skin, how her throat turned pink as pleasure took hold of her senses, her moans, her sighs, her soft, gentle, almost shy voice when she whispered my name with such awful delicacy as we lay entwined in bed. Constant torture it was. But it got me nowhere.

Not only had she disappeared from the face of London, but there was no evidence she had even existed.

Apart from the deep tattoo she had carved in my errant soul.

Visions of her kept me awake at night for months on end. Fleeting visions of other women in the street recalled a lock of hair, a swish of material, the simile of a smile, but of course it was never her. Just a pale imitation, a fuzzy piece of the overall puzzle that Callie had become.

Time passed.

I still couldn't forget her. Kept on wondering whether she would have disappeared if I had not posted the damn letter. But I knew, deep inside, that the scenario had already been written the moment I met her, and nothing I had done would have changed the outcome.

I was a mess.

Single life didn't suit me and there was no way my wife would have me back; she sensed that I had given my heart to Callie and would not tolerate its absence if we resumed our relationship.

For months I haunted the places we had been together. The pubs, the restaurants, I even stayed a few times in the same hotels for a night, always insisting on the room we had originally occupied. And invariably jerked off, screaming her name out loud as I came over the starched sheets or the bed cover, evoking mental images of her body, her sex, her royal rump.

I tracked the real Callie down, once Mark's wife. She now lived in Brixton with an Irish loft extension builder. She had long, straight, brown hair and round glasses, prettyish face but bad legs. There was no resemblance. But then I had to try every possibility.

By now – I still kept watching him on a regular basis – Mark was shacked up in the South London mews semidetached with a small redhead, who also worked in Canary Wharf. I had actually witnessed their meeting over the lunch break in a sandwich bar. Mr Cupid, that's me.

The windfall tax was passed and the official side of the Callie case came to an end. By then, Office A had found out about Office B's plans and I was called in and my services dispensed with, with minor apologies and a reasonable cheque for my efforts.

My nights were still empty with the despair of longing and the image of her face at rest on a shared pillow began to lose its intensity, its focus. But still I grieved inside. Badly. On the anniversary of our first fuck, I wrote her a postcard I never sent. Another on the next Valentine's Day. On what she had told me was her birthday. There were still people out there looking for traces of her, who had her description, paid by me. But nothing ever came up. I lost myself in work. Expanded the agency, and finally agreed we should now take on adultery cases. Why have scruples any longer? Business boomed.

Two years had gone by. The pain still buried like a tumour in my previously unfelt depths. Trying to grow old gracefully. I enjoyed an affair with one of our new operatives, Lucy, a small curvaceous auburn-haired young woman who broached no sentimentality and preferred a no-strings-attached relationship. She was good for me, uncomplicated, defiantly cheerful. What she didn't know was that most times I had to conjure up the ghost of Callie to stay hard when making love to her. But I suppose you wouldn't call that being unfaithful, technically speaking. Just a sex aid. Even took a holiday with her. Rented a white stucco villa in Southern Portugal where we shared our time fucking nonchalantly and eating too much. Which only served to remind me that I had never managed to go anywhere with Callie further than a few coastal furtive dirty weekend uninspiring hotels, and hadn't seen her on a beach, by the pool or even in a swimming costume.

Time, like a slow, slow river.

August 1999. Waiting for a train at Paddington Station, I was browsing through the newsstand and spotted a Paul Klee postcard. The second anniversary of our first time together was just a few days away, evoking balmy sensations of my fingers slipping through her curls and the oh-so tender softness of her uncovered, shivering breasts. I bought the card. Wrote “I miss you still” on the back, and then lacking an address as usual buried it in my pocket, there to gather oblivion again, until the next absurd celebration of her continuing absence.

Missing her was an understatement.

Every day and every night.

Still.

Always.

The station's loudspeaker system announced a 15-minute delay on the arrival of the Cardiff train. I had to sign for some documents a junior clerk was bringing up to London from a Bristol solicitor. I backtracked to the newsstand, searching for a magazine to kill the time, but none caught my attention. Moved over to the book racks.

At first, it was the cover illustration that I noticed. A photographic close-up of a woman's leg (thigh?), the constricted flesh bursting through the fishnet patterns of a stocking. An image that struck a responsive chord inside my dormant libido.

The Man Who Didn't Understand Women
by Katherine Blackheath.

I seldom read women's fiction, but the back cover blurb intrigued me. Something about a man and a woman, London, anonymous hotel rooms, three months of forbidden passion.

Standing at the centre of the station concourse, I began reading.

I finished the book at two the following morning. I'd cancelled an evening with Lucy earlier.

It was all there.

Our story.

With subtle changes: did I really never smile? I was no longer a private eye but merely an insurance investigator. But then I had never revealed my occupation to Callie; I had indicated I was a freelance journalist. It wasn't Eastbourne, but Brighton, and there was no mention of a husband but I now had two children ... Wholesale chunks of conversations we had had, in our usual pub, in bed, were accurately evoked. The fateful letter I had written. She even described the sounds I would make when I came, the words I would say, those she would herself whisper. The rituals of undressing and kissing. And the woman in the book was also called Callie.

I can't say I was shocked. Surprised, maybe. It was strange to see myself in print like that. Or at any rate a character who I could recognise as me. Possibly angry that she should steal our story in this way.

Towards the end of the novel after the two lovers had badly betrayed each other, they both travelled a lot, enjoying rather sordid adventures. Mine, I didn't mind. Hers, I winced at the thought that she might actually have fucked all these other men, it was so realistic. Difficult to know where the fiction and the reality took divergent paths. She wrote well, Callie, or was it Katherine did. I could sense the emotions, the feelings oozing from the pages as the narrative developed.

But nowhere was there an explanation for her actions, her disappearing act, all the obvious preparations she would have had to undertake to fool me in the way she did about her very existence. And neither was there a reason why the character in her novel did what she did to me, to him, the somewhat passive, seemingly spineless male protagonist.

Because she thought she loved him, she wrote somewhere in the book.

Which made the whole affair no easier to understand.

The novel ended with a melodramatic shoot-out straight out of a hardboiled noir movie, in which most of the characters, including the two of us, perished. Gave things a sense of closure, but felt all wrong, though.

I was tired. It was dark outside. I was puzzled. I was hungry.

Another mystery confronted me now:
The Curious Case of Katherine Blackheath
. Or
The Detective Who Always Drank Coca-Cola
.

The next morning I contacted the publicity department of the book's publishers in an attempt to obtain information about the novel's author. They promised something in the mail. All I received was a flimsy press release, which clumsily summarised the plot and promised oodles of promotion and reviews. About Callie, all it said was she lived in New York.

When we were together, my unfulfilled fantasy had been to take her to America. I couldn't quite picture her among the Manhattan hustle and bustle.

I tried to get more specific details through a junior in the publicity department, but there was nothing of substance to be had. The manuscript had been bought from a literary agent, through his British counterpart, and the author had been unwilling to provide any biographical details, let alone a photograph.

Within a week, I landed at Kennedy.

As my cab raced down Van Wyck Expressway towards the inevitable traffic gridlock beyond the Midtown tunnel, I wondered what to do next.

I'd never operated in a foreign country. The rules were different.

Here, private dicks used guns.

My hotel on West 44th Street was undergoing renovation and Polish builders tramped up and down the corridors, peppering the lift and lobby with white dust. The television set in the room wasn't working. I called out for a Chinese meal. By the time the food arrived, it was lukewarm and under spiced. By now I had jotted down on a pad my course of action. The art of detecting is to be methodical, organised and, most of all, patient. But I'd never been a patient person. Maybe that had been my undoing with sweet Callie?

Call the New York agent. Arrange an appointment. Have some bogus business cards printed up to present some sort of front. I'd brought over an assortment of glossy British magazines with some of the bylines I'd be borrowing for the occasion. I was confident few, if any, of the journalists involved would be known here. Small risk involved, really. Change travellers' cheques for lower denomination dollar bills. For transport, tips and bribes where necessary. Tomorrow, contact the local agency with whom my outfit had sometimes collaborated on the technicalities of past cases involving transatlantic connections. Visit the
New York Times
cuttings library to assemble American reviews of the book which might provide information to the author's whereabouts, in the likely absence of interviews. Determine how regulated British residents were. Was she here on a visitor's visa or did she have a Green Card? Government offices were a weak link where the right amount of money spread around might earn me some valuable information.