Page 7 of Smoke & Ashes
“No. I knew he was married, but only from the usual wife talk you get in the office. You know—got to get going or the Mrs will kill me—that kind of thing. We weren’t close.”
“Kids?” While I was ninety-nine percent sure Elise and her sisters couldn’t have children, it was always good to rule out the secret second family as quickly as possible. It saved a lot of trouble in the long run.
“I don’t think so. He might have said they were trying at one point.”
Okay, still turning up a big pile of nothing. I’d have felt frustrated except the job was about ninety percent big piles of nothing, ten percent people trying to kill you. Besides, if you were going to get nowhere, you could at least get nowhere over moules mariniere with a hot estate agent. “All right,” I tried. “Sixty-four thousand dollar question: do you know where he went.”
She nodded. “Maidenhead. I remember because of the poem.”
“The poem?” There was an ever increasing chance that this broad was too classy for me even if she actually was into girls.
“Slough?” To my surprise and tentative delight, I thought I recognised her expression. It was the expression that saidhave I fucked this up by saying something weird. I knew it well. “By Sir John Betjeman? Ricky Gervais famously recites a bit of it inThe Office? There’s a bit about going to Maidenhead in it.”
The waiter showed up with two glasses of what I assumed were a well-chosen white wine and two bowls of mussels. “So are you a big fan of poetry, or a big fan of early 2000s sitcoms?”
“A bit of both. But I did read English at university.”
Oh. “Cool. So, um, to be straight with you, I fucked up my A-levels then did a BTEC in private investigation so the chances of my being able to hold up my end of this conversation are pretty much zero.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no, it’s cool, I was just explaining. Poetry me.”
“Poetry you?”
“Yeah, hit me with some verse.”
She gave me what I thought was a challenging smile. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
“Fortunately, I’m not a man. And that’s not a proper poem.”
“It is, actually.” I had the uneasy feeling that I’d walked into a trap. “It’s calledNews Item. Dorothy Parker.”
I thought I vaguely knew the name as somebody fabulous and twenties-ish but could remember exactly zero of what she’d written. “What else did she do.”
“An awful lot in the same vein. She was … a bitter sort of wonderful.” Penelope picked delicately through her moules. I was definitely outclassed here—I was never going to be able to look that sexy eating buttery shellfish. “She also saidscratch a lover, find a foe.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“I thought she might be.”
I dug into my moules and took a much deeper swig of my wine than I’d been planning to. “I bet asking you about your favourite poem-slash-poet is, like, a total rookie move, isn’t it? It’d be like somebody asking me about my favourite—I dunno—way of solving crimes or something.”
“I thought your favourite way of solving crimes was to seduce information out of estate agents?”
“I have to admit, itisup there.”
“But you’re right.” She finished her wine and laid her cutlery neatly on the edge of her plate. “I don’t have a favourite poem-slash-poet. Although I am very fond ofThe Waste Land.”
The silence just sat there for a moment. “You’re going to make me admit I’ve never heard of it, aren’t you?”
“Oh absolutely, you’re cute when you’re embarrassed. And you’ve almost certainly heard some of it:April is the cruellest month,Fear death by water, and so on.”
None of that sounded familiar. “I mean, the death by water thing is good advice in general.”
“I don’t think it’s especially intended as a how-to guide. It’s more of a heap of broken images.”
“Can you recite it to me?”
