She decided to worry about her cat instead. It was far less worrying.
And so she had lain awake on the slightly too short and rather smelly sofa for most of the night, worrying about Artemis. Artemis liked her routine, she did not like disruption of any kind, it seriously freaked her out. For all the tough and together front she put on, all the girl-about-town swaggering she did, she was a bit of scaredy-cat when it came down to it. She was not keen to be nudged out of her comfort zone. Sophie was worried that she wouldn’t come back, that she would take the children’s invasion as a breach of trust between woman and cat and leg it forever to live life on the road, murdering small mammals along the way. She didn’t want Artemis to leave her. Despite her being the world’s most unfriendly pet, Sophie would miss Artemis sitting on what had become her very own armchair, casting Sophie the occasional imperious glance.
Even Sophie, who was not someone who needed a comfort zone, was feeling the pressure. Ordinarily she embraced change and welcomed a challenge. She just wasn’t keen on ones that came out of the blue in nothing more than slight frothy fairy dresses.
Fortunately, Artemis did come back, just before 5:00 A.M., which Sophie considered something of a step forward in their relationship, because it meant that the cat must have wanted to come home enough to come through the bedroom window, even though she would have known the girls were sleeping in there. Getting her priorities right, the cat had gone into the kitchen, and Sophie had listened to her eat what was left of her food and have a drink of water. A few moments later, Artemis had stalked into the living room and regarded Sophie with a look of pure recrimination before leaping on to the armchair and curling up on its cushion with her back turned on Sophie, who was somehow comforted by the snub.
Sophie had looked at the ceiling and, for the first time in the last nearly twenty-four hours, allowed herself to think about Carrie. Closing her eyes, she’d pictured her friend the last time she had seen her, three years ago. Small but curvy, with dark honey curls and hazel eyes that glittered when she laughed, and she was always laughing. She’d tied her hair up in a bandanna and worn a pair of paint-splattered dungarees over a T-shirt top. She’d teased Sophie for fretting about the upholstery in her beloved car as Sophie drove Carrie and her sticky children to the station to catch the train back to Cornwall.
“Call me if you need me,” Sophie had told Carrie as she helped her with her luggage onto the platform. “Call me anyway, but call if me you need me too—any time, okay?”
Carrie had laughed as she threw her bag onto the train with no regard for who or what it might hit. “Always, forever, whatever—right?” she’d said, hugging Sophie as she reminded her of their ancient pact.
“Exactly,” Sophie had replied, not quite able to say it back to her for fear of sounding a bit cheesy.
“Let’s see each other really soon, okay? I mean, I know your life is one constant social whirl, but I’m sure you can find time to see us somewhere,” Carrie had said.
Sophie had known that Carrie was being gently sarcastic, because although her job did guarantee at least three parties a month, her life outside the office had dwindled to almost nothing.
And Carrie had been right. It wasn’t that she didn’t have friends out there who wanted to see her and whom she wanted to see. It was just that something always came up at work to prevent it happening, and nine times out of ten she would have to cancel at the last minute. Carrie had lived a couple of hundred miles away, but Sophie had other friends she was just as bad at keeping up with. Christina and Sue from the gym, who both lived in Islington, for example. She hadn’t seen either of them in months, and they were practically neighbors. And she’d been supposed to meet the McCarthy Hughes olds girls for a drink on every fourth Thursday, but the last time she had made it, it was just after last call and all she could do was kiss her friends on the cheek as she exchanged hurried news in the line for a taxi.
“You have to let you hair down more,” her recently engaged friend and former colleague Angie had told her. “Don’t let McCarthy Hughes run your life. You don’t want to turn into Gillian!”
Sophie had laughed but secretly thought that, actually, she did.
Still, Sophie remembered thinking as she had said good-bye, Carrie was different. Carrie was her best friend and as much a part of her life as her mum was—if not more. No one knew her like Carrie did. She had to make more of an effort.
“Let’s not let another two or three years go by again,” she had said sincerely. “Let’s not. I never remember how much I miss you until I see you.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Carrie said with a grin. When the train pulled out of the station, Bella and Carrie had pressed their noses against the window and crossed their eyes as Sophie waved good-bye. Sophie had never seen Carrie again. It was possible, probable even, that if Carrie hadn’t died, she would never have seen any of her friend’s family again, because as soon as she had remembered how important Carrie was to her, she had forgotten it too.
“I’m sorry, mate,” Sophie had whispered, “I really am remembering how much I miss you now, believe me.” And then seventeen hours of drama had overcome her at last and she’d finally fallen asleep.
That had been forty-eight minutes ago. Right now Izzy was repeating her breakfast order with increasing urgency. Sophie looked over at the armchair. Artemis was no longer in it, lucky cat.
“Okay, okay,” she said, holding the palm of her hand in front of Izzy’s face. “Shush.” Izzy did shush. Her eye filled with tears, and her lips quivered perilously.
“No!” Sophie said quickly in a conciliatory tone, instantly fearing the wailing and screaming and holding of breath again. “No, no, no, no. Don’t cry, Izzy! Aunty Sophie wasn’t telling you off, no! Because you are a lovely good girl, aren’t you?” Izzy nodded and sniffed in a deep, damp breath. “Yes, yes you are—super-duper good excellent good grown-up girl who isn’t going to cry, are you?” Sophie nodded at the child encouragingly, and returning her nod, Izzy climbed without invitation onto Sophie’s lap and wound her arms around Sophie’s neck until her runny nose teeming with a billion odd germs was only millimeters from Sophie’s wrinkled one. That was Sophie’s main objection to the whole physical-displays-of-affection thing—it was just so unhygienic.
“I’ll be a good girl for you, Aunty Sophie,” Izzy said, picking up a thick strand of Sophie’s hair and winding it around her fist. “I’ll be your friend and we will all be happy and you don’t be cross, okay?”
Sophie nodded. She knew that any normal woman would be charmed and delighted by the comment—so why did she feel like it was a Mafioso-style threat?
“It’s a deal,” she said uncertainly.
“I’ll kiss you now, okay?” Izzy said, and without waiting for consent, she pressed her slimy face against Sophie’s tensed cheek, leaving her damp noseprint just under one of Sophie’s twitching eyes. “Breakfast now. I want Cheerios and…”
Sophie wiped the sleeve of her pajama top across her cheek and was contemplating how to break the no breakfast news to Izzy when she saw the walking pile of laundry that was approaching though the living room door. Bella dropped the sheets onto the rug.
“Izzy wet the bed,” she said a little anxiously. “It wasn’t me.”
Sophie felt the damp of the fairy dress skirt begin to seep through her pajama bottoms. She didn’t doubt Bella, all the evidence supported her case. Sophie took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to get stressed about it. It was just wee on her leg. It wouldn’t kill her. It probably wouldn’t kill her, although she might have to look that up on the Internet just to make sure. She’d just have to get changed, put these pajamas in the laundry hamper, and buy a new bed after they’d gone, that’s all. And new bedclothes and a new sofa and new cushions and new rugs. She wondered if the presence of a dead friend’s children was an acceptable risk on her homeowners insurance. If it wasn’t, it should have been.
Sophie lifted Izzy off her lap and sat h
er on the fragrant pile of sheets, where she could do the least damage.
“Okay,” she said to both girls. “Only thirteen days to go.” Both children stared blankly at her. “What I mean is, I have no food in the house. We’ll have to go out for breakfast. Luckily, there’s a twenty-four-hour Sainsbury’s at Manor House. We’ll get dressed. We’ll go there, okay?”
“Okay!” both girls said.
“I’m hungry,” Izzy said, glumly. “I’m starving.”
“I know,” Sophie said. “Which is why we have to get ready extra quickly, okay? And why we have to do everything that Aunty Sophie says, okay?” Sophie stared at both the girls as if she could hypnotically implant obedience into them. They stared back at her. She formulated a plan.
Of course Sophie’s plan, which was to empty Izzy’s treacherous bladder completely and get everyone out of the flat before malnutrition set in, did not work.
This is what happened instead.
Sophie sat Izzy on the toilet and told her not to move until she came back. She returned to her bedroom to dress and found Bella holding one of her Manolos in one hand and balancing precariously on the other with one foot. Sophie regarded the scene as if she had just come across Bella with her finger in the pin of a live grenade.
“Nooooo!” Sophie shouted commando style and, in her head at least, in slow motion.
Bella’s face fell, and she slumped on the bed facefirst, letting the shoe drop to the floor, from where Sophie scooped it up and cradled it momentarily before realizing that she had things a little out of perspective. She had been about to offer Bella a go at her low-heeled pumps when a clatter and a scream sounded from the bathroom. The Manolo was abandoned once again as Sophie realized her rookie error of leaving Izzy alone in the bathroom for longer than a nanosecond. She found Izzy jammed securely in the toilet, her calf sticking out at a right angle from the seat and wriggling furiously, her face and upper torso caked in Sophie’s expensive makeup collection.
Which meant another bath. And which Sophie was sure would mean another tantrum.
In any event, though, Izzy was amazingly contrite and even allowed Sophie to remove the offending fairy dress, which was now beyond all help, as long as Sophie promised to replace it with an identical one. Sophie chose not to worry about the logistics of that promise, concentrating only on the results it got.
Eventually she dressed in the bedroom, alongside both girls. Bella selected from the girls’ single suitcase a pair of red leggings with yellow dots, an electric blue T-shirt, a lime green cardigan, and a pink cotton ruffled mini-skirt to finish the outfit off. And, robbed of her fairy dress, Izzy carefully picked out items of clothing that were entirely yellow.
In the meantime, Sophie struggled to find clothes that were suitable for taking two small children to the supermarket. Sensible clothes were not Sophie’s strong point. Almost everything she bought was chosen to go to the office or a function in. And everything she bought was chosen with a particular pair of shoes in mind. Sophie put shoes first. If she saw a wonderful pair that she had absolutely nothing to wear with, she would buy them anyway. In her experience, shoes were like fashion magnets. The right clothes would simply be drawn to them. Sophie was especially proud of this philosophy she had invented all on her own, although she did have to admit that it sometimes took a lot of hard shopping to reach outfit Nirvana. Consequently, Sophie was limited on casual wear, principally because she didn’t do much casual wearing.
Eventually she found a pair of jeans that she had forgotten she had and possessed only because she had felt compelled to help her mum redecorate the house last year with washable stainproof paint. After some rooting about in the backs of her drawers, she found an old pink Calvin Klein T-shirt that had the logo spelled out in diamantés, which she pulled reluctantly over her head.
Sophie looked at her shoe rack, which was neatly attached to the inside of her wardrobe door, and scanned her shoes. The most sensible and expendable pair of shoes she had were from River Island, low kitten heels in magenta pink with pointed toes and a thin strap that crossed each toe horizontally, ending in a tiny bow.
Once, only yesterday in fact—although it seemed like a dim memory now—it had amused her no end that such a pair of shoes were her most sensible ones. Now it dismayed her. Not because she wished she were better prepared for all scenarios but because she wished that her life was back to normal.
When the threesome finally emerged from the flat, Sophie felt curiously triumphant, as if she had survived an apocalypse.
The thing is, she decided, squinting slightly in the glare of the bright winter sun, to keep your nerve. If I can just do that, it’ll be a breeze.
Six
Cal was not nearly as enthusiastic about Sophie’s plans to turn bounty hunter as she was. Especially when she asked him to look up Louis Gregory on the Internet—as if the man and his whereabouts would be handily listed by Google in an A–Z directory of missing feckless fathers.
“This is not the telly, Sophie,” he told her impatiently over the phone the morning after she decided to find Louis Gregory herself, mainly by getting Cal to do it. “You don’t type a name into the Internet and then suddenly, schum-schum-schum, there’s the current location, address, and a satellite image of the person’s every movement. Do you know what I got when I typed Louis Gregory into the Search engine? Three hundred and eight-two thousand matches. And is your Louis Gregory the Louis Gregory? New Zealand’s greatest living sheep shearer Louis Gregory? Not unless he’s sixty-two and a Maori he’s not. I do have a job to do, you know. Just exactly when do you expect me to go through all of these entries that probably have nothing whatsoever to do with your Louis Gregory?” Sophie had tapped her chipped nails on the edge of her bed. She was nervous about being in the bedroom when the girls were not, but she didn’t want them to know she was looking for their dad too. She wasn’t even sure they knew they had a dad. They hadn’t mentioned him since they’d arrived. She wasn’t sure what sort of an effect that kind of news might have on them, but if it was anything on a par with their reaction to the news that she did not have Cbeebies on her TV, she didn’t want to risk it.
“Oh, come on, Cal. I need you here. It’s an emergency.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Cal snapped. “You’re the one on holiday after all.”
Sophie paused. She thought about telling him in detail about the inevitable demise of her laptop, involving a tube of John Frieda Sheer Blonde hair serum, the residue from an empty box of Coco Pops, and a pair of nail scissors, but she decided against it. She couldn’t stand the ridicule again; she could still hear the hysterical laughter of the IT support man ringing in her ears.
“My laptop’s broken,” she said. “I’m not getting a replacement until next week. And anyway, if this was a holiday, it’d be an all-expenses-paid trip to the Siberian salt mines of the former Soviet Union. Cal, you’re my personal assistant—assist!”
Cal tutted. “I think you’re taking the personal bit a bit too literally,” he muttered.
Sophie paused. She never stopped to think about the nature of their relationship too closely, but she had made the assumption that the occasional weekend shopping trip, the odd after-work cocktails in the city meant that it was more than just a professional one, that it was a friendship of sorts. She hoped so, because Cal was the only friend she managed to see regularly, even if the fact that he worked for her did help the friendship along. Perhaps she was asking too much of him. Perhaps she was straying into things-you-can-ask-your-boyfriend-to-do-on-the-grounds-that-you-let-him-have-sex-with-you territory.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean to impose on you.”
Cal huffed again. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t pull the martyr act on me, love, I’m immune. Besides—I’ve got the answer to all of our problems.” He lowered his voice. “I know someone who can help.”
“Who?” Sophie asked, touched and reassured by Cal’s reclassification of her problems as “ours.”
“Maria Costello,” Cal said proudly. “Private detective. She’s not cheap, but she’s good—she always gets her man. We’ve got a lot in common in that respect.”
For a moment Sophie didn’t know what to say. She’d associated Cal’s friends and acquaintances with a number of professions, from drag queen to car mechanic, but she would never have guessed he’d know a private detective.
“A private detective?” she asked. “How do you know a private detective?”
Cal’s voice was rich with drama. “Oh, you know. I’ve done a little…let’s call it ‘freelance’ work for her.”
“Freelance work?” Sophie questioned him anxiously. “What sort of freelance work?”
“Well,” Cal whispered. “Have you ever heard of ‘the honey trap’?”
“Yes?” Sophie said uneasily.
“Well, honey, I was the honey in the trap!” Cal giggled.
“You’re lying!” Sophie cried, utterly scandalized. “Please tell me you’re lying. If this ever got out…you have to be lying,” she repeated.
Cal sighed. “Yes, all right, I am lying—spoilsport. Her offices are in the shop below my flat, but that’s just boring. Anyway, she is very good, and I’ve told her all about you, and she says she can find him, no problem. She says it will be, quote unquote, a piece of cake. Do you want to see her?”
“How much would it cost?” Sophie began uncertainly before she and Cal reached the same conclusion at exactly the same moment.
“Actually, I don’t care how much it costs,” she said.
“Trust me. You don’t care how much it costs,” Cal said simultaneously. “And besides,” he continued, “you have nothing better to spend all your money on.”
Sophie had to agree that, right at the moment, she did not. “All right, ask her to come to the flat today,” she said. “We’ll be here. I’ve worked out that, if we don’t actually leave the flat, we’ve got an eighty percent better chance of survival.”
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