and preoccupations that left him alert and tireless at four in the morning? Standard anxiety-insomnia, Alan would say too much going on.
He slipped out of bed and stood naked in the bedroom dark wondering whether to half-dress or not. He pulled on Stella’s towelling dressing gown – the sleeves ended in mid-forearm and his knees were showing but it would do as precautionary decency. Stella’s daughter Barbuda was still away at school so the coast was clear, in theory. Barbuda had walked into the kitchen late one night, sleepy and pyjamaed as he had searched the fridge, naked, looking urgently for something savoury to eat. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat and it was fair to say that things had never been quite the same between them since then, in fact he thought Barbuda’s previous indifference had turned, after that chance meeting, to a peculiar form of hate.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, he tried not to think of that night nor of what degree of tumescence he had or had not displayed. He stared out at a corner of the brightly lit scaffolding yard visible through the kitchen window. A tight row of flat-bed lorries, the enormous shelves of planks and pipes, the skips filled with clamps and extenders… He remembered his first visit here, on business, one of his early ‘adjusts’. Stella walking him coldly round the yard, £175,000 worth of material stolen. Everything had been painted the Bull Scaffolding colours, ‘cerise and ultramarine’, she had assured him. She had been away on a Caribbean holiday. The security guard had been pounced on, bound up and had watched helpless as the team of villains had driven off three trucks laden with the requirements of next day’s scaffolding job, an entire tower block’s worth in Lambeth.
It was an obvious con, a clear scam, Lorimer had decided, a cash-flow problem needing to be speedily resolved, and with anyone else he would have been confident that the £50,000 cash he was carrying in his briefcase would have proved too tempting. But it soon became equally obvious that this small, wiry, blonde woman with the hard but oddly pretty face was, in loss adjuster’s parlance, ‘nuclear’ through and through. ‘Nuclear’ from ‘nuclear shelter’ – impermeable, unyielding, impregnable. She was proud: a single woman, no support, her own business, a ten-year-old daughter – all bad signs. He returned to Hogg and reported his conclusions. Hogg had openly scoffed and had gone back himself the next day with £25,000. ‘Just you watch,’ he had said, ‘those lorries are parked up in a warehouse in Eastbourne or Guildford.’ The next day he called Lorimer in. ‘You were right,’ he said, chastened somehow. ‘A grade-A nuclear. Don’t get many like that.’ He allowed Lorimer to be the bearer of the good news. Rather than telephone (he was curious, he wanted to check her out further, this genuine grade-A nuclear) he drove back to the Stockwell depot and told her Fortress Sure would honour her claim. ‘I should fucking well think so,’ Stella Bull had said, and then asked him to supper.
He sipped at his scalding tea, one sugar, slice of lemon. They had been sleeping together, off and on, for nearly four years now, Lorimer reflected. It was by far and away the longest sexual relationship of his life. Stella liked him to come to her house (Mr Bull, an obscure figure, was long ago divorced and forgotten), where she would cook a meal, drink a lot, watch a video or late-night television, then go to bed and make fairly orthodox love. The visits sometimes extended into the next day: breakfast, shopping ‘up West’, or lunch in a pub – a pub on the river was what she particularly liked – and then they would go their separate ways. They had spent perhaps five weekends together in three years and then Barbuda went to boarding school near Reigate. Since then, during term-time, Stella had taken to calling more regularly, once or even twice a week. The routine did not change and Lorimer was intrigued to note that its increased regularity had made nothing pall. She worked hard, did Stella Bull, as hard as anyone he knew – there was good money to be made in scaffolding.
He exhaled, feeling suddenly sorry for himself, and switched on the television. He caught the end of a programme devoted to American football – the Buccaneers against the Spartans, or something similar – and watched it uncomprehendingly, happily