“Oh yes, my parents were enormous Gerry Anderson fans. They nearly called me Virgil.”
“Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Brains.”
“True. I recommend the moules mariniere, by the way. They specialise in seafood, I hope that’s okay.”
It took me a moment to get my head back in the game. “We’re talking dinner again, right?”
“Unless you’ve changed your mind and want to cut straight to the seduction.”
I glanced at the menu. “Well we could always split the difference and go straight for the oysters.” Once, long ago, there was an oysterer’s daughter. Fucking Julian—she needed to stay out of my head while I was working-slash-on-the-pull.
“So what did you want to know about Edward?” The look in Penelope’s eyes was almost shy, and despite my finely honed detective’s instincts I couldn’t quite work out whether she was messing around with this whole come seduce me thing or if she actually meant it.
“Whatever you can tell me would help. Mostly I just want to know where he is.”
“I’m not sure there’s a lot to say. He was … ordinary.” A waiter came by and we ordered drinks and a couple of plates of moules. When in doubt get the same as your date, that way you’ll both look equally stupid eating it. “Nice enough. Worked well and made good commissions. He never came in stinking of weed or alcohol if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“And never had any strange people showing up asking questions about him.”
“Only you.” She smiled at me. Fuck, I really, really hoped she didn’t turn out to be straight. When this was over I was going into a garage and getting my gaydar checked.
“Guess I walked into that one. Did you ever meet his wife?”
“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 said have I fucked this up by saying something weird. I knew it well. “By Sir John Betjeman? Ricky Gervais famously recites a bit of it in The 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 called News 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 said scratch a lover, find a foe.”