him, but then Suze’s judgement had never been entirely sound. Her mother was the perennial good-time girl, preferring to dance on tables all hours of the night, play bingo and get bladdered rather than take proper care of her house and kids. Suze thrived on flattery, and seemed unable to distinguish between fake and genuine. Gracie had always thought her dad did the right thing in leaving her; she still did.
‘I’ll take my things on up,’ she said, grabbing her bag just as Claude reached down to get it. ‘Thanks,’ she said with a tight smile at him. ‘And Mum – can you dig out their addresses?’
‘Address,’ said Suze, looking at her daughter with a cold eye. ‘They got a flat together, it ain’t much.’
But better than staying here with you and this arsehole, thought Gracie.
‘Jot it down for me, will you?’
‘Jesus, what did your last slave die of?’ asked Suze with a sniff.
‘Insolence,’ flung back Gracie, dismayed to find that when dealing with her mother she still felt like a snippy teenager. ‘You going to see George tonight at the hospital?’
‘No.’ Her mother’s eyes filled with easy tears. ‘Not tonight. Tomorrow. My poor boy.’
‘I’ll tag along then. If you don’t mind?’
‘Mind? Why should I mind? I’m only surprised that you care enough to bother.’
Gracie gave her mother a long hard stare. But what was the use? They’d never got on; they never would. She turned her back and pounded off up the stairs to her room. Her mother hadn’t hugged her, and she hadn’t hugged Suze, either.
Two hours later, she was awakened by grunts and bangs from the room next door to her own.
Oh, terrific.
As if she didn’t have enough to contend with, now she had to listen to creep features and her own damned mother doing the nasty through the thin partition wall. A perfect end to a perfect day. How the hell could Suze do that, in these circumstances? She thought of George, lying in a hospital bed. And Harry. Where the hell was Harry? She thought of the note with the hair. No police. Then she thought of gentle, easy-going Harry out there somewhere, in trouble, alone, and it pulled at her heart. Finally she turned over and pulled the pillows over her head. It was hours before she could get to sleep.
NOVEMBER
Some time after Laura Dixon had shagged him shitless in the Gents at her divorce party, Harry was crossing Covent Garden when he spotted his former client, the cougar – Jackie Sullivan – browsing among the blooms outside a florist. He stopped walking and stared. He was getting to be an old hand at the escorting business now; he had plenty of dosh; he was happy.
It was cold today. Freezing. His breath plumed like smoke with every exhalation. The cougar was wrapped up in a white fake-fur hat and matching gloves. She wore black boots and was carrying a Kelly bag. Her coat looked expensive, patterned in a large black-and-white dog’s-tooth design. Harry thought she looked adorable; he started to smile, and approached her as she halted to stare in the window at a display of red hothouse roses.
‘Hey,’ he said, touching her shoulder.
She turned. Her face was the same; small, sharply formed, anxious of expression. Her pale denim-blue eyes stared at him with something like panic.
‘Hey, it’s me,’ said Harry, beaming.
‘Um . . . hello,’ she said uncertainly, ‘How are you?’
Another woman came up beside her. This one was large, hard-faced, dark-haired and wearing a Burberry trench. Harry had thought the cougar was alone.
‘Jack darling, I don’t like the red,’ she said in a hectoring tone of voice. ‘I much prefer the cream – so much softer, don’t you think?’ The brunette’s eyes, full of curiosity, were now resting on Harry. There was a predatory half-smile on her crimson-painted mouth. ‘And who’s this?’
The cougar’s cheeks flushed the same hectic red that Harry had found so charming on the night they’d spent together.
‘Oh, this is . . .’ she hesitated.
‘Harry,’ he supplied for her, shaking the woman’s hand.
‘He’s a friend of my daughter’s,’ said Jackie quickly. Harry glanced at her. The blue eyes looked back at him without expression. ‘They were at uni together.’
Harry felt a stab of hurt at that. Like he was a dirty secret. Then he remembered her pushing him out through the door into the dawn, and realized that was precisely how she saw him – as something shameful and disgusting, to be concealed.
He shouldn’t have touched her shoulder. Shouldn’t have smiled at her. Shouldn’t have breezed over here like she’d be pleased to see him. It was patently obvious that she wasn’t.
Of course she wasn’t. Why would she be?
‘This is Camilla,’ said Jackie formally. ‘A client of mine.’
He understood that Jackie was marking out her territory, drawing boundaries. Jackie was an interior designer. She was posh. She spoke like thet. Like one of the nobs. She was way above him in the social scale of things; he was nothing but a good-looking chancer, living on benefits and selling his nubile young bod for undeclared amounts of money. He felt he’d made a major error, made a complete bloody fool of himself. He should have been more careful, more discreet.
‘Well, it was nice seeing you again, Mrs Sullivan,’ he said.
‘You too, Harry,’ she said, very polite.
Harry looked into her eyes again. Saw nothing there, no small spark of the connection that had been there on the night he’d stayed. He nodded once, then turned and walked away.
‘Emma’s a very lucky girl,’ said Camilla, her eyes following Harry as he walked off. ‘What, darling?’ asked Jackie vaguely, looking with intense concentration at the cream-coloured blooms that Camilla favoured.
‘What an exquisite young man.’ Camilla was still watching Harry, admiring the luscious fall of his shoulder-length auburn hair, his wide shoulders beneath the black leather bomber jacket, the tight fit of the stonewashed jeans on his long, long legs. Finally he was lost in the crowds. Camilla gave Jackie a louche look. ‘Imagine waking up to something as wonderful as that in the morning.’
‘Yes,’ said Jackie with a cool smile. ‘Imagine. A mixture of the gerbera and the roses, do you think? Yes?’
‘Lefty in?’ Stew asked Gordon, who was policing the door of Deano Drax’s fetish club in Soho. Stew had nipped over from the strip joint over the road. They were both doormen, and they had become pals, so they often stood out in the alley beside
