Snoops?’
‘Sorry?’ Cass spluttered.
‘Snoops adores him. We’ve had him since he was a tiny puppy. Just a baby. The bastard, how could he do this to us? How could he do this to Snoops?’ The woman began to sob. ‘I’ll hunt you down, you heartless evil bitch. How could you do this?’
Cass stared at the handset, not sure what to do next; she had left her home number, for God’s sake. If the woman had rung there first she also had Cass’s name and her mobile number, because they were on her answer-machine message.
‘Just tell me one thing,’ the woman bawled. ‘Have you slept with him? Have you? Please tell me that you haven’t slept with him.’
‘I haven’t slept with him,’ Cass said firmly in as even a tone as she could manage.
‘Oh God, I don’t believe you,’ the woman wailed. ‘How could he do this to me? How could he? After all that I’ve gone through.’
‘No, no really,’ said Cass, more emphatically this time, trying to calm her down. ‘I haven’t slept with him, cross my heart. I barely know him. We met on the train.’ This was crazy.
‘You cow, you cow – how could you?’ screamed the woman. ‘How could you sleep with another woman’s husband? You home wrecker.’
That did it. Cass had had enough; she snapped.
‘Whoa now, hang on a minute there, lady. I don’t know who you are, but I’m bloody sure I haven’t slept with your fucking husband, all right?’ she roared at the top of her voice.
Which might well have been an end to the matter if at that very moment Artie hadn’t opened the double doors to the conference room and said, ‘Are we OK out there?’
‘He’s with you now, isn’t he?’ wailed the woman.
Cass looked heavenwards. Artie’s smile didn’t falter. ‘Perhaps you should take a few moments.’
The train ride home was very uneventful.
There were five messages on the answer machine when Cass got in. The first was from the madwoman with a dog called Snoops, then one from David, one from the girl who did their ironing and one from the parents of the girl who did their ironing, and the last one – with the number withheld – was something that consisted mostly of sobbing and screaming, interspersed with snarling and possibly some swearing, but it was difficult to pick out because there was a dog barking frantically in the background.
Cass had just got to the end of them when Jake appeared through the front door, pulling on a sweater. ‘Danny’s ready, I’ve put the dog in the Land Rover, and a curry in the oven for when we get back from the b—’ He looked at her. ‘What?’
Cass pressed play, skipped the loony and went straight for David.
‘Hi, Cassandra, it’s David.’ As if she didn’t know. ‘Just a quick call. I think we need to talk. I appreciate that you may feel a little aggrieved at the moment, but, after all, marriage is a game of two halves.’ He laughed at what passed for a joke in his neck of the woods. Jake shook his head as the message continued. ‘So, I wondered if I might pop round one evening…Probably once Danny is in bed would be better, don’t you think? Wednesday would be good for me. After squash.’
‘Amoeba,’ spat Jake, pressing the skip button.
‘Hello, Cass, it’s Abby,’ said an uneven, rather thin, weepy little girl voice. ‘I just wanted to explain…you know, about everything and stuff.’
Jake groaned. ‘Do we have to listen to this?’
‘I don’t want you to be angry or anything,’ Abby interrupted. ‘It just happened, you know. I don’t think that either of us, we – you know, me or David – meant it to. Not really. It was just, you know, like, one of those things, and that, you know.’
‘Fuck, these things should be banned.’ Jake pressed skip again.
‘Er, hello there. This is Abigail’s dad here. We wondered if we could pop round for a bit of a chat one night,’ said a gruff no-nonsense voice. ‘We were hoping for some kind of explanation, really. I mean, me and her mum feel that Abby was in your care, technically. And we didn’t think –’
Jake pressed the button again. ‘Maybe you should arrange it so that they come round the same night as David?’ he said, skipping to the last one, the wailing and the barking. ‘What the hell’s that?’
Cass sat down on the bottom stair. ‘Snoops, possibly. What did you say your friend in Brighton’s name was again?’
Hidden away in his motel room, James Devlin slipped off his jacket, very carefully hung it up in the wardrobe, settled down on the bed with his hands behind his neck, and considered his next move.
A few days later, a Thameslink train slowed to a crawl and pulled into Brighton Station. Cass collected her things together and peered out of the grimy carriage window; she wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. Brighton didn’t look at all like a seaside town, more like King’s Cross on a bad day, maybe even grimier. There were the sounds of seagulls, but Cass wouldn’t have been surprised if they were a recording being played over the tannoy.
Pulling up the handle on her suitcase, Cass made her way along the platform towards the exit, looking at the sea of faces as she did. Barney, Barney – what the hell did a bad-tempered artist called Barney look like?
Oh, there, that just had to be him: leaning against a pillar was a small plump man with grey skin, bloodshot eyes, a beard like a bird’s nest, and a lot of hair growing out of his ears. He was smoking a roll-up and wearing a nasty oversized well-stained sweater that would have passed muster on any self-respecting artist from eighteen to eighty.
She was about to walk over to him when a cultured voice said, ‘Cassandra?’ She swung round to be greeted by an elderly man who was leaning heavily on a walking stick. His thick silver-grey hair was slicked back and tucked behind his ears, and he was wearing an expensive, beautifully tailored grey suit and a paisley waistcoat. He looked like a well-heeled country squire.
‘Barney?’
The man extended a hand and smiled. ‘Absolutely. Delighted to meet you, my dear. Bartholomew Anthony Hesquith-Morgan-Roberts. Jake sent me a photo of you; it does you no justice at all.’
His deep, dark brown voice came straight out of one of the better public schools, pure top-drawer, clipped and nipped and terribly posh, and Cass – although she smiled and shook his hand – could feel the chip on her shoulder weighing heavy. David was an ex-public schoolboy too and the most terrible snob, and thought some of what he referred to as ‘her funny little habits’ anything but funny.
‘But do feel free to call me Barney,’ the man was saying. ‘Everyone else does, despite my best efforts to stop them. Still, it’s rather nice to give the whole moniker an airing once in a while. So, what did Jake tell you about me?’
Cass looked him up and down. Barney was tall and nicely made with broad shoulders, a generous mouth and a big hawkish nose that dominated his large suntanned face. She had no doubt that, in his day, Barney had been a total rogue – and most probably still was when he got the chance. He had bright blue eyes, and when he smiled his whole face concertinaed into pleats like Roman blinds and promised all manner of things.
‘That you’re a miserable old bastard,’ she suggested.
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘You know, it’s such a cliché, but sadly it’s absolutely true. I used to be a miserable young bastard, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? For years people – mostly women, it has to be said – have been convinced that I’m complex and deep, a wounded soul who needed saving