Hilary blushed and lowered her eyes. ‘Sorry. It just slipped out. Honestly, I didn’t mean to upset you. I promise to remember in future… Roxanne.’
She touched Roxanne’s arm again in a gesture of conciliation. Roxanne stepped backwards, bumping into a passer-by. She did not want any contact with Hilary, not one more conversation. Let alone a future.
‘You may have changed the way you look,’ Hilary said, ‘but I’d recognise you anywhere. You just can’t hide those gorgeous cheekbones.’
She gave a nervous smile. She was always clumsy when she tried to say something nice. Roxanne felt her stomach contract. The last thing she wanted to hear was that anyone could identify her as Cassandra Lee.
‘Why have you followed me down here?’
‘You make me sound like a stalker or something.’
Roxanne took a deep breath. ‘Funny you should say that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, aren’t stalkers simply people who obsess about others?’
Hilary said nothing for a few moments. Roxanne gnawed at her lip. She’d meant to wound, but she hadn’t enjoyed it. She’d said it so many times over the last seven years and she had to believe that it was true: she hated inflicting pain.
‘Look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Oh, really?’ Another thing about Hilary. She could never keep the sarcasm out of her voice for long. ‘You could have fooled me.’
‘This isn’t helping either of us,’ Roxanne said.
‘It’s not easy for you, sure. But think about me. It took courage to call you, believe me, after everything you said the last time we were together. You hurt me then and you knew it.’ She paused as a couple of youths jostled past them. ‘Look, this is no good. We can’t have a private conversation in the middle of a busy street. Is there somewhere we can go?’
It was a trap, Roxanne understood at once. Hilary wanted to insinuate herself back into her life. Yet they did have to talk. It was unavoidable. ‘There are gardens on the Embankment. We can talk there without being overheard.’
‘Not quite what I had in mind,’ Hilary said. ‘I thought – maybe a restaurant? We could have a meal together. My treat. You’re still as thin as a rake, you know… Roxanne. I’m sure you’re not looking after yourself, eating properly. I wouldn’t mind betting that your ribs still show through. You ought to…’
‘The gardens are just the other side of those buildings,’ Roxanne interrupted, starting to walk away. ‘Come on.’
‘All right, you win,’ Hilary said, panting as she tried to keep up. ‘As per usual. You’d better lead me there. I’m just a country girl. I don’t know the big city.’
Roxanne knew perfectly well that Hilary had been born and brought up within five miles of Manchester Town Hall, but she didn’t rise to the bait. She headed for a bench in front of a bed of roses, looking out on to the commuter traffic and the river beyond. When she had settled herself, Hilary said, ‘You certainly took a lot of finding.’
‘I didn’t want to be found.’
‘Well, anyway, congratulations. I always knew you were determined, to say nothing of bright. But I never dreamed you would have found a job with the people’s lawyers. Creed, no less. Even their telephone holding music is something special. Did I read that Jarvis Cocker composed it as a special favour for his mate Will Janus? Very impressive.’
Roxanne breathed in. The perfume of the roses was fighting a losing battle with petrol smells from the road. ‘I could say the same for your detective work. Tracking me down here.’
‘Not easy, I promise you. Or quick. I had to make a lot of calls. You wouldn’t guess how many.’
Roxanne could imagine. When Hilary set her mind to something, she never gave up. Perhaps that was part of their problem. Each was determined, each regarded the other as ludicrously stubborn. ‘How did you find out?’
‘It’s a long story. I asked around. Networked. I may be a provincial solicitor, but I do have a few contacts in the Smoke, you know. Eventually I traced you to Hengist Street. I had a long chat with your old boss, Mr Ibrahim. He sounds like a nice man. Harassed, of course, over-worked, but willing to spare a fellow member of the profession a few minutes on the phone. He told me how proud he was of what you have achieved.’ Hilary paused. ‘I take it for granted that he has no idea Roxanne Wake and Cassandra Lee are one and the same person?’
‘You’re right,’ Roxanne said. She found herself stifling a yawn; the sheer weight of deception was exhausting. If Hilary had been talking to people, perhaps there was no point in asking her to keep her mouth shut. The truth might already be out. ‘Before you ask, neither does Will Janus.’
‘Somehow, that doesn’t altogether surprise me, darling.’ Hilary spoke like a seen-it-all mother in conversation with a teenage daughter confessing she was no longer a virgin. ‘I mean, I’m sure the great man is broad-minded, but even he might draw the line at recruiting Cassandra Lee. It’s taking equal opportunities a bit far, even you must admit that.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
Hilary gazed at her, open-mouthed. ‘For Heaven’s sake, Roxanne. What kind of woman do you think I am? After everything you and I went through together. Everything we shared. How can you possibly imagine, for even one second, that I would betray you? Darling, when have I ever let you down?’
Roxanne focused on a boat chugging in the direction of Tower Bridge. She felt remorse, tugging at her sleeve. Hilary had rescued her. Without Hilary, she would not have had a life, let alone been here in London, working for a swish law firm, starting at last to make her own way in the world.
She gritted her teeth. ‘That doesn’t mean that I want us to be together any more. I meant what I said last time. I owe you more than I can pay back. What I won’t do is work off the debt in bed with you.’
Hilary buried her head. ‘I see.’
‘Sorry, but you need to understand. My mind’s made up.’
‘All right.’ Hilary stood up. ‘I won’t waste any more of your time. I’m sorry too, Roxanne. I suppose I needed to hear it from you, one more time. Once you’d had a while to reflect. I could never quite believe that you’d come up with the considered opinion that you don’t want to share your life with me. Stupid of me, obviously.’
Roxanne realised this was a good moment to hold her tongue. She had to expect Hilary to be bitter.
‘Tell me one thing,’ Hilary said, her voice trembling. Any moment now, Roxanne thought, and she would burst into tears. ‘What on earth possessed you to call yourself by that awful name?’
‘Roxanne is Persian for “dawn”. I read it in a magazine.’ Roxanne’s cheeks were hot. How could she have been so naïve? ‘It seemed to suit a new life somehow. Same with the surname.’
‘You always were a romantic at heart. An idealist.’ Hilary’s little pointed teeth started to nibble at her upper lip. ‘I’ll say goodbye, then.’
Roxanne rose to her feet and Hilary held out her hand. They shook, an oddly formal, business-like gesture.
‘You do understand?’ Hilary asked. ‘I – I just had to see that you were all right.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I hope so.’ The serious eyes stared into hers with such intensity that Roxanne winced. And then Hilary turned and walked away without glancing back.
Chapter Five
Nic still felt dazed, kept reliving the minutes leading up to Dylan’s murder, picturing the knife in Ella Vinton’s hand. Each time he yearned to re-write the script, but he never managed to conjure up a happy ending. Dylan always finished up dead and Nic was left soaked to the skin in blood and guilt.
The police returned. Two different officers this time, but again his account foundered on the rocks of the Met’s institutional scepticism. All they told him was that Dylan’s killer still had not regained consciousness. One journalist after another showed up; he gave good quote but little else. Until he understood what had happened, he would say nothing to the Press about E
lla, or the dying man’s last question.
Why not jazz?
A puzzle which took on fresh meaning when he listened to the hospital radio. Lots of Chicago, Luther Vandross and Abba. He hated being cooped up with the muzak and the disinfectant smells and the squeaking of trolley wheels. Hated it. While the medics deliberated over whether he was all right, he discharged himself. His head throbbed, his brain was messed up, but was it any wonder? After all, he’d seen a friend killed, a friend he’d tried and failed to save. He’d get better quicker in the world outside.
He walked back to Clerkenwell, rather than catching a bus or a cab. Whenever he could, he travelled the city by foot. He didn’t drive in London, keeping his old car simply for trips outside the city. As for the Tube, its sweaty stench made him want to retch. Cycling would have saved time, but in the overcrowded streets it was an eco-friendly form of Russian roulette. On a bus he would eavesdrop on the conversations of his fellow passengers, but there were limits even to his curiosity and when he took a taxi he turned a deaf ear to the cabbie’s maunderings about Tottenham Hotspur and the single European currency. So mostly he walked. It was a way of trying to make sense of the place. He wanted to get close to it, to pound the uneven pavements until the city soaked into his being and he felt at last like a native.
Yet however many miles he covered, London remained foreign to him. He’d read all the books, he’d walked far and wide, he knew where Blondin the tightrope maestro was buried and how to find the site of England’s first permanent scaffold. But when he was alone and his mind wasn’t stretched to the full, a sense of the city’s unspoken hostility always crept back up on him. At times he felt like an astronaut stranded on a forbidden planet.
‘Spare us a bit of cash.’
Someone peering out from under a woolly hat was lying in the doorway of a barbers’ shop, wrapped up in a pile of old newspapers and a dirty pink blanket smelling of stale tobacco and urine. Nic tossed a pocketful of coins into a grimy hand. The man might have been anything from twenty-five to sixty. London did this to people. It seduced them and then it let them down.
He’d arrived here on leaving Cambridge and spent twelve months at law college in Lancaster Gate, sharing a house with fellow students, through one of whom he’d met Dylan Rees. He had no career path in mind. The lesson he’d drawn from his fractured childhood was that it was pointless to look ahead. One could spend so long planning the future only to find everything blown away in a moment. He decided to go with the flow and, when the people he knew gave up on fantasies of backpacking round the globe and stayed on to earn serious money, he did the same. At the last minute he found articles with a City firm, and when his two years of training were up and he was offered the chance to stick around, he seized it. After all, he had nothing to go back to in Ravenscar. It wasn’t because people called it the town that never was. Home simply didn’t exist any more.
He soon made his mark. He could seldom manage more than a couple of hours’ sleep a night, and when he was awake he was happy to work. The firm kept hiking his pay and at his performance appraisals, heavy hints were dropped about prospects of partnership. The only problem was, he didn’t want to practise law. Rules might be necessary, but it turned out they didn’t solve anything. For years, he’d daydreamed about writing a book and the time had come to see if he could hack it. He could have moved anywhere, he only needed a roof over his head and paper and pen. Yet an invisible yoke tied him to London. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself. The exhaust fumes made his eyes water, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else that he wanted to be.
He bought a houseboat moored near Battersea Bridge. A gesture of defiance. If he could not escape, at least he could pretend that he was out of the city when the midnight racket outside his bedroom window came not from screaming junkies but from geese guarding freshly hatched chicks. He loved the rocking of the boat on summer evenings. He’d started sleeping longer. Even during winter storms, when his books were sent flying from his shelves and an eight-hours-a-night man would have been kept awake, he felt no nostalgia for high rise living. He’d written The Innocence of Dr Crippen on the boat and returning to dry land never crossed his mind until after he fell for Phil. The pair of them drank too much one evening and drifted into a conversation about living together. It was out of the question for Phil to share the boat. She became seasick watching Titanic. So he’d finished up in Clerkenwell and the first time he spent the night there his insomnia returned, as bad as ever.
Phil’s flat was a stone’s throw away from the excavated remains of the House of Detention. Increasingly, he thought of it as an elegant contemporary equivalent of the old jailhouse. He unlocked the front door and paused on the granite kerbstone which formed a step down to the main living area, listening to see if she had come home. The flat was one of half a dozen carved out of a disused Victorian school. Visitors exclaimed at the cleverness with which the architect had converted the shell, keeping the old high ceilings and the sense of airiness within a confined space. Phil liked to say that the place was more than a home, it was a statement. The architect had once been her lover, and she reckoned he would come running back if she so much as whistled. The granite step was supposed to provide the rough, freestanding element that the ex considered necessary to ease the transition from the door to the principal living quarters. There was no getting away from the ex. His pretensions were all around.
Phil was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. He caught sight of a single glass on the top rack. She jumped as she heard him come into the room.
‘I wasn’t expecting them to let you out so soon.’
‘I’m fine.’
She offered her cheek and he kissed it, dutiful as a middle-aged husband. Her skin was cold and her breath smelled. Unlike most of her colleagues at work, she didn’t much care for nose candy. She was at least old-fashioned enough for drink to be her vice. In their early days as a couple, they’d often got pissed together. They both loved Chablis; it had been a kind of bond.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be out with that client all evening?’
She pulled away from him, averting her face. She was a little unsteady on her feet. ‘He cancelled at the last minute. The bastard.’
Unaccountably, he felt a spurt of sympathy. This particular client was supposed to be trying to keep the lid on an internal fraud, but Nic was sure Phil and he were having a fling. He hadn’t checked the fridge to see if they were low on strawberries and cream, but there had been a good many late night sessions in the past month. If the time spent was justified, the whole of the client’s accounts team must have been in on the scam.
He moved to her side again and put his hand on her shoulders. Through the silk top, he could feel the tension in her. ‘You okay?’
Silly question. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had run. ‘Of course I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Just tired, that’s all..’
‘Uh-huh.’ He gave her shoulder a squeeze, wondered how long it would take before she began to pick a fight.
She turned to face him and he had his answer. ‘Mel called. Seems the Press are taking an interest in you again because you saw Dylan getting his throat cut. De mortuis and all that, but maybe every cloud has a silver lining. You could be hot again if you seize your chance right now.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, when are you going to start work on that second book?’
‘And what should I write about?’
‘Hey, you’re supposed to be the one with the vivid imagination. You can think of something. It doesn’t matter what.’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Oh, for Chrissake! It’s four years plus since you sold Crippen. Three since it came out. No wonder Huckerbys have threatened you with the sack.’
He shrugged. She was right. His publishers were losing patience. They’d chafed for a long time. He’d made them enough money to earn kid glove treatment for the first year or two, but lately they’d been muttering about breach of contrac
t. So what? He couldn’t write to order.
‘Don’t tell me you’re still waiting for your Muse!’
‘Fine,’ he said, aiming to be infuriatingly amiable. ‘I won’t mention it.’
Even on the occasions – not so rare now as in the early days – when she looked untidy, there was no hiding her beauty. Rich chestnut hair, cheekbones to die for. Behind her head was a row of spice jars on a fitted shelf; she had been known to hurl them in a drunken temper. He didn’t need to ask her why she kept all the jars when she never bothered with anything more exotic than bayleaf and thyme. Apart from their value as projectiles, they were integral to the ambience, another of the ex’s nice little touches.
‘I’m making a coffee,’ he said. ‘Want one?’
Her cheeks were flushed. ‘Right now, what I want is to get on with my work. One of us has to make a stab at earning a living.’
He switched on the filter machine while she disappeared to her work station. The ex had created a mezzanine level with room for two vast computer desks as well as a spare bedroom. It was reached by the staircase made of aluminium and stainless steel cables which arced through the air like the shiny skeleton of a prehistoric creature unknown to science. Phil loved it; sometimes he thought she loved the whole place more than she could love any man. The ex had been architect of his own downfall.
The phone trilled. His agent had called the hospital only to learn that Nic was no longer a patient. He didn’t bother with words of sympathy, cutting to the chase with an an offer – ‘kid, the money will make your eyes water,’ – for a two-thousand word piece for The Mail on Sunday. Nic didn’t need to think it over before saying no.
Mel was a loud New Yorker who had missed his true vocation as a yellow cab driver. ‘Fuck me, Nic. You’re Johnny on the spot when a legendary headhunter is brutally slain and you don’t race straight off to your keyboard? Bad fucking attitude, you’ll never make a proper writer.’
Take My Breath Away Page 5