‘OK. But I won’t promise I’ll never try to pitch you into using Mortensen and Brannigan.’
‘Speaking of which, how did you get into the private eye business?’ Michael said.
I couldn’t decide whether it was an attempt to change the subject or a deliberate shift away from the professional towards the personal. Either way, I was happy to go along with him. I didn’t think I was going to get any more useful information out of him, and I only had to look across the table to remember that when I’d agreed to this dinner, my motives hadn’t been entirely selfless. By the time we’d moved on to coffee and Armagnac, he knew all about my aborted law degree, abandoned after two years because the part-time job I’d got doing bread-and-butter process serving for Bill Mortensen was a damn sight more interesting than the finer points of jurisprudence.
‘So tell me about your most interesting case,’ he coaxed me.
‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘It’s your turn now. How did you get into insurance?’
‘It’s the family business,’ he said, looking faintly embarrassed.
‘So you followed in Daddy’s footsteps,’ I said. I felt disappointed. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe I expected him to live up to that profile with a suitably buccaneering past.
‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘I read Arabic at university, then I worked for the BBC World Service for a while. But the money was dire and there were no prospects. My father had the sense to see that sales had never interested me, but he persuaded me to take a shot at working in claims.’ Michael raised his shoulders and held out his hands in an expressive shrug. ‘What can I say? I really enjoy it.’
All of a sudden, I remembered one of the key reasons I like being with Richard. He lives an interesting life: music journalist, football fan and Sunday morning player, part-time father. I was sure if I hung around with Michael Haroun, I’d learn a lot of invaluable stuff. But not even the most brilliant raconteur can make insurance interesting for ever. With Richard, no two days are the same. With Michael, I suspected variety might not be the spice of life.
Now I’d established that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the man, I felt a sense of release. I could take what I needed from the encounter, and that would be that. My life wasn’t about to be turned on its head because I’d fallen in love with a profile when I was fourteen.
With that comforting thought in the front of my mind, I had no hesitation about inviting him back for more coffee. The fact that I’d forgotten to mention Richard to him somehow didn’t seem too important at the time.
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