Page 64 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I t took longer than I imagined. But on a warm, drizzly evening, I found myself on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End. Among the theatregoers, tourists, and Friday-night revellers, I spotted Ludo Boche standing outside the Gielgud Theatre, deep in conversation with a middle-aged woman with fabulous teased-back 1980s hair. Tucked under his arm was a neat brown paper parcel. I scooted across the road to meet him.
“Both cheeks!” he said as we kissed hello. “You’re in theatreland now. Best look like a total lovey, so you don’t blow your cover.”
“My cover?”
Ludo discreetly pointed to the book under his arm.
“Oh! I see, the book.”
“Ixnay on the booknay,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger, before introducing me to Wilhelmina. “Willy is an old friend. She’s the theatre critic for The Sentinel .”
“Delighted to meet you,” Wilhelmina said. “Slightly disappointed we didn’t get to deliver the merchandise using a dead letter drop in Saint James’s Park.”
“Oh, that would have been much more fun,” Ludo said. “Or we could have met on a mist-covered bridge at midnight. Much more cinematic.”
“Or we could have shoved it down the back of a radiator in the men’s WC at the British Museum,” Wilhelmina suggested.
“That’s much less cinematic, though,” Ludo said.
“Depends who else is in there,” Wilhelmina said, digging Ludo in the ribs.
Ludo slapped a palm to his head. “Wait, should I have photographed each page and sent this to you on microfilm?”
I hadn’t heard anyone laugh at their own jokes like that since Aunty Cheryl knocked back a balloon of nitrous oxide in a Benidorm backstreet and tried to get sassy with a street lamp. When they noticed I wasn’t laughing, they straightened themselves up.
“Sorry,” Ludo said, handing me the book. “Got a bit carried away.”
Wilhelmina joined in the apology. “It’s been such an enjoyable mission.”
“Mission?” I was confused.
“Stealing the book,” Ludo said.
“You stole it?”
“Not me,” Ludo said. “Wilhelmina ‘Quick Fingers’ Post here swiped it off the desk of The Sentinel ’s music reviewer.”
“Oh my God! Won’t you get in trouble?” I asked.
“She won’t even notice it’s missing,” Wilhelmina said. “She reviews music for The Sentinel . Musicians only appear on her radar after they’ve been dead for two hundred years. Minimum. There’s no way she’s heard of Cole Kennedy, let alone plans to write about him.”
Ludo tapped the top of the book. “Besides, by the time the embargo lifts, The Bulletin will have printed all the juiciest bits already, and all that’ll be left for everyone else to write about is how jolly terrible the syntax is.”
“Have you read it?” I asked. “Is it bad?”
“The syntax?”
“The things Jasper has said.”
Ludo grimaced. “I’ve skimmed it.”
“And?”
Ludo fished around, looking for the right words. “Look, I guess it’s a bit ‘rock and roll.’ But who among us hasn’t made the odd youthful mistake?”
Wilhelmina’s pin-thin eyebrows leapt so high they risked catching a breeze and taking flight.
“Who among us hasn’t been shagged in a toilet on a four-day cocaine bender?” she said.
The words twisted in my heart.
“Oh, come on, Willy, that’s a British rite of passage,” Ludo said. “Do you think people go to Ascot for the horse racing? No, they go to snort fat lines of dirty drugs off grubby Portaloo seats and get buggered senseless by the hot older brothers of the chaps who bullied them at Eton.”
Wilhelmina squinted. “That was oddly specific, Ludo.”
Ludo’s eyebrows went up. “Not me. I didn’t go to Eton.” He quickly turned his attention back to me. “Bad news on the acquisition.”
“Acquisition?”
“Of the Pure Network. By The Sentinel .”
“What do you mean? What’s happened?”
Ludo shrugged. “Bit of a wrinkle, I’m afraid?—”
The bells started to ring, calling the audience into the theatre. The poster on the wall showed it was preview night of a new production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible .
“That’s us,” Ludo said. “Listen, Sunny is stuck at work, so I have a spare ticket, if you’d like to see the show? Then we’re meeting my brother at Maxime’s afterwards, if you fancy it?”
The book was itching in my hands. I’d delayed too long as it was. I needed to get this contraband copy of Dirty Little Secret to Fiona so she could start working her way through it. The first serialisation would appear in The Bulletin in the morning.
“I better go,” I said. “But, quickly, The Sentinel’s still buying Pure, yeah?”
“If they can, yes.” Ludo glanced at the crowds disappearing inside. “Must dash, dear fellow.”
I thanked them both, and we said our goodbyes.
As I jogged towards Piccadilly Circus, weaving through crowds of pedestrians with the book buried safely under my arm to keep it dry, it started to speak to me, to tempt me. Like Gollum with the One Ring in Lord of the Rings , now that I possessed it, I couldn’t give it up. I had to know what was in it. I abandoned the Tube and turned up Regent Street to find a bus stop. The bus would give me a lot more reading time.