“A dance thing. Finishes at nine. But Dad’s in town. Why don’t you see if he’s around?”
Dexter’s dad is called Tony, he’s about to turn sixty, and he lives in Nevada with his third wife, Maddy. But he also has a town house in Seven Dials, right bang in the middle of Covent Garden, and it has always been Jane’s fantasy that even though they’ve been divorced for over five years, Tony might secretly leave it to her in his will.
Jane gets on with Tony, especially when Maddy is not around, butshe’s not sure a night out with her ex is exactly the grimy city night she had had in mind. She messages him anyway:
I’m in town. Are you around tonight? Dinner?
Seven Dials is buzzing on this hopeful May afternoon; the sun still sits high enough in the sky to cast light onto the pavements, people wear sunglasses, the tables outside bars and restaurants are all full. The door to Tony’s Seven Dials house is painted dark green with the numbers 3 and 1 attached in gold. It’s the dictionary definition of discreet; a million pairs of feet have walked past Tony’s front door over the two hundred years it’s been sitting there and only a small percentage of people will ever have noticed it. On the ground floor of Tony’s house is a shop selling high-end organic toiletries. When Jane first came to stay at this house the shop on the ground floor sold secondhand vinyl.
Tony buzzes her in and she takes the steep old staircase to the second floor, where Tony sits at the kitchen counter in front of an open laptop.
Tony is not a looker. He never was. It was always about his charisma. His rough edges. His money. His charm. And more than that, it was about the contrast between him and her first husband, who’d had a title and land and looked like a Prince Charming come to life but was a horrible kisser and slept in proper pajamas.
“Hello, sweetie,” he says, in the slightly camp, native–New Yorker way of his. He pulls her close for a bear hug and she smells a long day on him; she smells his lunch, the coffee he had after his lunch. The smell is reassuringly familiar and slightly dreadful both at the same time. She’s glad, she thinks, so glad that she is no longer his wife. She is glad, she thinks, that she is no longer anyone’s wife. But God, she misses this house. Tall and narrow, renovated by an interior designer in the nineties, tired around the edges now but still with the lingering glamour of an expensive job done well: real marble, real mahogany, real leather trimmings, mutedlighting giving it the feel of old-school Manhattan, like an apartment in a Scorsese movie, or an old Woody Allen.
Tony pours her a drink.
She says, “I really wanted a dirty night out. You know. Messy drunk. Maybe a club? Don’t suppose you’re in the mood for that?”
Tony shakes his head. “Nope. Not me. But don’t let me stop you. You’re welcome to treat this place like a cheap hotel and crash out here when you’re done. As long as Maddy doesn’t find out about it.”
Jane sighs. “Thank you. That’s sweet. But I don’t really want to go out by myself. I wish I still had friends in town, you know? I used to have so many friends in London. I wonder what happened to them all?”
“They all ended up dead, or in the country.”
“That’s probably true,” she says. Then she sighs again. “Funny being this age, isn’t it?”
Tony laughs and passes Jane her drink. He offers her his glass for a cheers. “To being a funny age.”
Jane clinks her glass against his. “But I mean, we are not old. We really are not old. But yet, what little time we have left; it’s terrifying. Christ, Tony, you’ll be seventy in ten years and then you’re in the countdown basically. Months, days, minutes. Where did all that time go? That formless, unimaginable infinity. Urgh. I just want… I just want every minute to shine, you know? Be amazing.”
“And?” says Tony. “Is it? Amazing?”
“No!” she replies crossly. “No, it fucking isn’t. It’s pretty shit actually. I mean, I have the dogs, obviously, and they are my joy. But the house.” She pauses. “I had an estate agent round yesterday to value it. It has to go, I know it has to go, it’s on the verge of falling down, just like me…”
“Nonsense, you’re stunning. Always have been, always will be.”
“Like I say—on the verge. I can feel it coming but it’s not here yet. And I do sometimes wonder if I should just get a job or something.”
“Heaven forfend.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Jane says, slowly, circumspectly, as it is thefirst time she has said this out loud, “that I might retrain as a private detective.”
“Ha!” Tony scoffs, but then narrows his eyes at her when he realizes she’s being serious. “You mean it?”
“Yes! Remember that thing earlier this year with that marriage scammer guy who murdered his wife? Simon Smith?”
Tony shakes his head.
“Well, it was a big story here in the UK and I was kind of involved with it, tangentially. The daughter of one of the victims asked me to help her because I used to know her father. She didn’t trust this guy, didn’t believe he was who he said he was, and it was all so satisfying, following all the leads, asking people questions—it just ignited something in me. And then, yesterday, something really strange happened. The estate agent had just left and I was feeling super emotional and this little dog appeared in the bluebell woods at Rosebery, from nowhere, and it turned out he belonged to a guy in Hampstead. Me and Dexter dropped the dog back there today and…” She pauses. “I don’t know,” she says softly. “There was something really off about the whole thing. About the guy. His weird house.” She pauses again. She has never told Tony about the night she went home with a complete stranger on the flimsy promise of a job. She’s certain he would not judge her, not all these years later, but still, she can’t quite bring herself to let him see the desperate, broken fool she’d once been. “Anyway,” she continues, lightly, “it turns out that the dog had been staying with a young woman called Rose at my neighbor’s holiday rental and now Rose has completely disappeared, and I’m just all tingly with it, you know? I want to get involved.”
“Well then, why not?”
“Because I’m not actually a private investigator. I’m just a nosy old bag who’s barely worked a day in her life.”
Tony tuts. “Jane,” he says. “Stop it. You’re a brilliant woman. You just haven’t had a lot of experience in the trenches.”
“Fifty-five and good for nothing!”
