Page 25 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

Confidently, as though he owned the place – which, a tiny stab of memory told me, he might well do, or his father, at least – Flynn approached the receptionist on duty, a very well-groomed lady behind a computer screen.

I watched him stride over to the desk smiling, and felt a momentary doubt follow that memory thrust. Flynn.

Lean and dark and with that slightly diffident air that made him fade into the background.

I wondered if he’d learned that from being around his father, who, if I remembered rightly, was practically mobile foreground.

Could he and I ever…? I was nothing, a struggling nobody and he was – well, he was Flynn.

Then I remembered his unhappiness, his confessions about picking the wrong woman, his insecurity in his own judgement.

Flynn might be from a wealthy background, he might have all the advantages, but really he was just a bloke.

A rather nicer bloke than the ones I usually associated with, admittedly, but, at base, just a bloke.

We had as good a chance as anyone else.

‘Right.’ Flynn bundled Fraser and I backwards until we were concealed in a little seating area behind a screen, obviously meant for businessmen to sit with their laptops between meetings. ‘She can’t tell me where he’s booked, obviously.’

Fraser frowned.

‘GDPR,’ Flynn explained.

‘What, like Russia?’

‘Data protection. But she did tell me that there’s a few talks, meetings and conferences going on here today, and that Eddie is most likely booked onto one of those. They all start at nine.’

All three of us looked across at the restaurant.

Eddie was still there, drinking something that looked like a green smoothie.

He was taking this ‘healthy eating’ thing as seriously as Fraser, I thought, looking at another table where a couple were working their way through a plate of eggs, beans and toast, and feeling my stomach give a little wriggle of hunger.

The air smelled of coffee too, which didn’t help.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

Flynn took out a piece of paper. ‘Right. So, Meeting Room One is something to do with fashion design, Meeting Room Two is medical, Meeting Room Three is overseas sales, and the Hobson Suite, whatever that is, is a local arts committee meeting.’ He looked at us. ‘So, take your pick.’

We looked at the printed sheet.

‘Can we have breakfast?’ Fraser rubbed his stomach. ‘I’m starving here.’

‘In a minute,’ I replied, as distractedly as though Fraser were an annoying child we’d brought along.

‘Well, I need a wee then.’ Fraser headed for the toilets and Flynn sighed.

‘Why did we bring him?’

‘Because we can’t leave him at home alone, it’s not kind.’

We both grinned. ‘And he’s all right, is Fraser,’ Flynn said and winked at me. ‘I don’t suppose any of these meetings are undercover pork products.’ He bent back to the page.

‘What else does Eddie do?’ I wracked my brain for anything that Annie may have mentioned. ‘He does the garden. He goes to the gym. None of those things are covered here either.’ A distant memory jangled. ‘But she did say that he was buying a lot of new clothes…’

‘Fashion design?’ Flynn said, with disbelief dripping from every syllable. ‘You think?’

I shrugged. ‘Could be. Perhaps our Eddie is a thwarted Ozwald Boateng.’

We stared at one another. Each of us was clearly writing Eddie an alternate history in another life. ‘Bit of a step from just buying new clothes though.’ Flynn clearly couldn’t reconcile Alternate Eddie with the one we had actually met.

‘True.’

Fraser wandered over. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘Can we go in the restaurant now? If I don’t get at least some coffee and a sausage sarnie, I’m going to be ill.’

Flynn jumped up. ‘Bugger! I was going to follow him and see which meeting he went into, and we’ve missed him.’

I patted his hand. ‘We’re not professionals. It’s not our fault.’

‘Okay. So, we have to wait for him to come out.’ Flynn looked worried. ‘My delivery comes at twelve. Damn, I’ll have to put that off.’

‘We could go round all the meeting rooms and pretend to have walked into the wrong one?’ I suggested. ‘See which one he’s in. And if he’s with anyone,’ I added.

‘That’s me.’ Fraser straightened his back. ‘I’m born to walk into rooms I’m not wanted in. You should have seen our Chloe’s face when I walked in on her and…’

‘Good man,’ Flynn interrupted. ‘Well volunteered. We’ll be right behind you.’

‘But can we have breakfast first?’ Fraser wheedled. ‘Might not have the strength otherwise. Might not make it up the stairs.’

So, we all went and had breakfast. Eddie was, as Fraser pointed out, in here somewhere. All we had to do was find him, and it would be easier if we were full of bacon and egg, plus we had to give him time to get settled.

Once we were all refuelled, we set off.

‘Let’s start at Meeting Room One and work our way round,’ Flynn suggested, as we walked confidently up the stairs – ‘The secret is to look as though you belong here,’ he advised – and found the first meeting. ‘Designers’ Guild of Britain,’ it said on a temporary sign tacked to the door.

Fraser opened the door cautiously and slithered in. He was there for a couple of minutes, then slithered back out again, if anyone as robust as Fraser could be said to slither.

‘Nope,’ he said, definitively. ‘There’s loads of women and blokes in very tight trousers, though. It was all about colour, and scarlet will be “in” in 2028, apparently.’ He nodded wisely. ‘Which is great. It’s a good colour. Covers up the stains.’

‘But no Eddie?’ I asked.

‘Nope,’ he said again. ‘Unless he were hiding behind one of the skinny blokes.’

‘All right.’ Flynn led the way down the carpeted corridor. ‘Oh. This is Meeting Room Three. Meeting Room Two must be on the other side. Let’s try in here. This ought to be…’ He took out the now much-folded piece of paper. ‘Overseas sales. It doesn’t say sales of what, though.’

Fraser again opened the door a crack and inserted himself into the room.

‘I was sure he’d be in design,’ I said sadly.

Within seconds, Fraser was back out again, holding a leaflet. ‘Someone tried to sell me a chalet in Lloret De Mar,’ he said, looking shell-shocked. ‘Honest, do I look like someone who can afford a chalet in Lloret De Mar? Where is Lloret De Mar, anyway?’

‘Spain,’ Flynn said. ‘No Eddie?’

‘Hard to tell. Lots of people moving around, but I couldn’t see him.’

I tapped my finger against Flynn’s printout. ‘If it’s something like timeshare, and Eddie’s looking at buying a place… could be. Annie did say he watches Escape to the Country.’

‘All right. We’ll keep an eye on Room Three when they come out,’ Flynn said. ‘Look, Meeting Room Two is over here. What was that?’

I looked at the paper. ‘Medical. Is it worth bothering? Eddie’s not exactly a paramedic wannabe, is he?’

‘Ought to check,’ Fraser said. ‘You never know.’

‘All right, on you go.’

Flynn and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the door as Fraser went in. As we jostled against one another, Flynn looked down at me and winked again. Behind those glasses, his eyes were full of laughter. ‘What the hell are we doing?’ he whispered. ‘Playing Columbo?’

‘We’ve come all this way,’ I whispered back. ‘We might as well…’

From the other side of the door came a sudden thump, then the sound of a lot of people becoming agitated. Flynn and I looked at one another, then threw the door open.

Fraser was lying on the floor, a few metres into a large room.

About twenty people were sitting around a table, and a woman was standing at the front of the room, obviously showing slides on a screen which had been erected on a smaller table.

On the screen was a very large image of something that looked like a joint of beef, under the enormous headline:

Gangrenous Limbs

Three of the seated people had got up and were attending to Fraser, who was moaning slightly as he came round.

Eddie was sitting at the front of the room, staring.

‘What’s going on?’ the lady at the front with the laptop clicker looked baffled.

‘I think I fainted,’ Fraser said in a distant tone from the floor. ‘That’s horrible.’ He waved a hand at the slide, without looking up at it.

‘You’ll be all right,’ said one of the men who’d assisted him to start sitting up. ‘Take it steady. Try not to think about what you saw. God knows, we all are.’

‘Can you turn it off, please?’ said another man. ‘It is a bit… well.’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Laptop Lady, looking from the enormous picture, which I could now see was a rotting limb, to Fraser and then to her audience.

‘I know. But let’s get this bloke out of here first, all right?’

Gently they got Fraser, pale and wobbly, to his feet. Eddie was staring at the three of us with an expression that indicated he expected a UFO to come and beam us all up any second.

‘Er,’ he said.

‘But… who are these people?’ Laptop Lady looked as though she was on the verge of tears.

‘I think…’ Eddie said slowly, ‘that it’s my wife’s Portuguese evening class.’

Now we’d attracted the attention of everyone in the room. Someone laughed.

‘Why on earth would your wife’s Portuguese evening class be crashing our lecture?’ This was a man sitting sideways on his chair.

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Eddie said, now looking as though the UFO couldn’t come quickly enough. ‘It’s very strange.’

The screen at the front went blank. ‘I think,’ said Laptop Lady, still looking shaken, ‘that we’ll have a ten-minute break for coffee.’

Fraser, holding on to chair backs and tabletops, inched his way over to Flynn and me.

Eddie was coming too, creeping his way between his fellow lecture attendees and the chairs as though he didn’t really want to see us at all and hoped we’d turn out to be figments of a custard tart-inspired imagination.

‘I think we might have some explaining to do,’ Flynn said, his voice low.

‘That’s all right, so has Eddie,’ I replied. ‘Are you all right, Fraser?’

Fraser shuddered and, hand-over-hand, made his way towards the door. ‘Nobody,’ he said heavily, ‘should be surprised by gangrene after a fry-up.’

The crowd trickled out, some throwing us puzzled looks as they went, until it was only Flynn, Eddie and me in the room, with Fraser in the doorway taking deep breaths. We all looked at one another, nobody knowing quite where to start.

At last Eddie spoke. ‘Did Annie put you up to this? Does she know?’

‘She thinks you’re having an affair,’ I said. ‘And no, she doesn’t know we’re here.’

‘An affair?’ Eddie sat down suddenly on one of the plastic chairs. ‘Good Lord. Really?’

‘We’re not really a Portuguese evening class,’ Flynn said. ‘We’re the Monday Night Heartbreak Club. Formerly the Disappointed Valentines’ Club. Which, I think, says it all, really.’

‘Vengeance Squad.’ Fraser, sounding a little pathetic, was sticking to his guns. We ignored him.

‘Dis…?’ Eddie looked down at his knees. ‘I bought her flowers,’ he said sullenly.

‘The day after,’ I chimed in. ‘You forgot for the first time in forty years.’

‘And you’ve lost weight.’

‘And bought new clothes.’

‘And then there’s the gym,’ Flynn finished. ‘Plus taking days off and not telling her. An affair was a logical conclusion to draw.’

‘Bloody right,’ put in Fraser, still avoiding coming back into the room.

‘And you went to that place in York,’ I said.

‘You mean you’ve been following…? Oh.’ Eddie glanced over at Fraser. ‘The gym. You’ve been watching me.’

Eddie looked as though his world had vibrated underneath him and shaken him to a different location, one where he was lost. He put his head in his hands and groaned faintly.

‘So, what’s it all about?’ I asked. ‘And I warn you, we’re on Annie’s side here, so we won’t be keeping any dirty little secrets you might have.’

‘Oh.’ Eddie slumped even further. Not as dramatically as Fraser had evidently done, but he leaned forward until he was staring at his knees. ‘Oh.’

‘And why are you at a medical convention?’ Flynn asked. ‘Being shown dreadful pictures of limbs?’

Eddie took a deep breath but kept his eyes downcast. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you. But you mustn’t tell Annie. I’ll tell her myself, but I need to do it in my own way and my own time. I need to think how best to phrase it.’

Visions of incredibly kinky sex swam before my eyes again for a second. Flynn nudged me and when I looked at him, he nodded towards Eddie. Clearly questioning the accused was my job today.

‘Eddie,’ I said as gently as I could manage. ‘You’ll feel better if you just tell us.’

‘All right. But not here.’ Eddie tried to raise his head. ‘I can’t face them now. Can we go downstairs?’

‘I need a milkshake,’ came Fraser’s voice from the doorway. ‘Can you buy me a milkshake?’

‘I told you we should have left him at home,’ Flynn observed.

‘I’ve had a shock.’

‘Right. Downstairs. We can have this discussion over a pot of tea,’ I said.

‘And a milkshake,’ came Fraser’s input.

‘And a milkshake for the four-year-old.’

We followed Eddie as, with footsteps that scraped the nylon carpet with their reluctance, we all trooped downstairs.