“What’s she like?”
“Pleasant enough, I suppose. Too nice to have any lasting career in this industry. Believe me, Cecil, this time next year no one will remember her name.”
“It’s Cyril,” I said. “And what about the Beatles? Do you know them?”
“John’s a friend,” she replied with a shrug. “Paul isn’t, not anymore, and he knows why. George was my last before Julian.”
“Your last what?” I asked.
“Her last fuck,” said Julian, taking the grisly remains of his girlfriend’s dinner and placing it on the table behind us. “Can you believe it? George Harrison walked in the door just before me!”
I tried not to throw up.
“No, there was someone else,” said Suzi nonchalantly.
“What? Who? I thought I came next.”
“No, you couldn’t do it, remember?”
“Oh yes,” he said, grinning a little. “I forgot.”
“Couldn’t do it?” I asked, intrigued. “Why not?”
“Crabs,” he said with a shrug. “Picked them up from God knows who. Suzi wouldn’t come anywhere near me until I had a clean bill of health.”
“Well of course I wouldn’t,” she said. “What do you take me for?”
“And what about Ringo?” I asked, wanting to move away from Julian’s crabs. “Where do you stand on him?”
“I don’t stand anywhere on him,” she said, waving his name away like an insolent fly that was buzzing around her face. “I’m not sure he’s worth standing on. I mean all he does is play the drums. A trained monkey could do that.”
The conversation continued in this way for sometime—Suzi had strong views on Cilla Black, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp, Kingsley Amis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, four of whom were former lovers of hers—and by the end of our night out, I disliked her even more than I had disliked the idea of her, which previous to that evening had not even seemed possible to me.
Naturally, I didn’t tell Mr. Terwilliger any of this when he phoned, simply mentioning that Julian was out of the country and uncontactable. He was very disappointed—Julian was the star turn after all—and said that this was the second piece of bad news he’d received, for Julian’s former paramour, Bridget Simpson, wasn’t available either.
“She’s probably forgotten all about him anyway,” I said. “I daresay she’s been through quite a few Julians since then.”
“Actually, no,” said the journalist. “Miss Simpson is dead.”
“Dead?” I repeated, sitting up abruptly in my office chair in the same way that Miss Ambrosia did whenever she realized that her Auntie Jemima had come to visit. “How dead? I mean how did she die?”
“She was murdered by her driving instructor. Apparently she wouldn’t play with his gear stick, so he drove the pair of them into a wall out near Clontarf. She died on impact.”
“Jesus,” I said, uncertain how to respond to this. I hadn’t liked her very much but that had been years ago. It seemed like a nasty end.
“So that just leaves you and Miss Muffet,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Mary-Margaret Muffet,” he said, and I could tell that he was reading the name from a piece of paper. “She was your girlfriend at the time, am I right?”
“She was not!” I cried, even more shocked by this insinuation than I had been by the news of Bridget’s death. “I barely knew the girl. She was a friend of Bridget’s, that’s all. I don’t even know how they knew each other. She came along to make up a foursome.”
“Ah right,” he said. “Well, she’s agreed to meet with me. Do you think you’d be able to come along at the same time? It would make more sense if I could get a conversation going between the pair of you, a reminiscence of what happened on the day in question, you know how it is. Otherwise she’ll tell me one thing when I’m talking to her and you’ll say something completely different and the reader won’t know who to believe.”
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to have any part of it but didn’t like the idea of Mary-Margaret, of whom I had only a vague memory, having the spotlight all to herself and making potentially slanderous remarks about Julian to the national press, so I agreed to meet with them. When I arrived on the appointed afternoon, I shook hands with her warily but, to my relief, our joint recollections of that day in 1959 did not differ very much. We told Terwilliger everything we remembered, although Mary-Margaret made it clear that she was unwilling to discuss the surprise involvement of Brendan Behan in the incident for the simple reason that the man was a vulgarian and she wouldn’t like his words to be repeated in a newspaper where impressionable children might stumble upon them.
Afterward, it seemed polite to ask whether she wanted to join me for a cup of coffee and we made our way toward Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street, taking one of the booths by the wall as we tried our best to make conversation.
“I generally don’t like Bewley’s,” said Mary-Margaret, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the table and placing them on the seat beneath her bottom to avoid any contamination. She wore her hair in a bun at the back of her head and, although she was dressed like a representative from the Legion of Mary, there was no denying that she was pretty enough if you liked that sort of thing. “The seats can be terrible sticky. I don’t think the girls clean them after people drop their crumbs. That wouldn’t be my standard at all.”
“But they do make a good cup of coffee,” I said.
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said, taking a sip from her tea. “Coffee is for Americans and Protestants. Irish people should drink tea. That’s how we were brought up after all. Give me a nice cup of Lyons and I’m content.”
“I don’t mind the occasional cup of Barry’s myself.”
“No, that’s from Cork. I only drink Dublin tea. I wouldn’t risk something that’s made the journey up on the train. They do a lovely cup of tea in Switzer’s café. Have you ever been there, Cyril?”
“No,” I admitted. “Why, is that somewhere you go a lot?”
“Every day,” she said, beaming with pride. “It’s very convenient for those of us employed by the Bank of Ireland on College Green and it has a more elite clientele, which seems only right and proper. I don’t think the bank directors would be at all happy if they saw me in any old street café.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, you’re looking great anyway. That was a mad day all the same, wasn’t it? The day Julian got kidnapped.”
“It was very disturbing,” she replied, shivering a little, as if someone had just walked over her grave. “I had nightmares about it for months afterward. And when they started delivering his body parts—”
“That was terrible,” I agreed.