your sister to look after her… No, more than that. To say Alicia was hers; bring her up as her own.’
‘Yes.’ In the wide, high-ceilinged room, Victoria’s voice was suddenly very small.
‘And she didn’t mind?’
A shadow passed across Victoria’s eyes. ‘You have to understand. Cathy, that’s my sister, I mean, she’s wonderful, she’s lovely with Alicia, really, but she just isn’t… Well, we’re different, chalk and cheese, she isn’t like me at all, she doesn’t…’ Victoria drank from her glass and went back to balancing it on her knee. ‘All she’s ever wanted was to settle down, have kids, a place of her own. She didn’t want to…’ Victoria sighed. ‘… do anything. She and Trevor, they’d been going steady since she was fifteen; they were saving up to get married anyway. Mum chipped in, help them get started. Trevor, he was bringing in good money by then, Ford’s at Dagenham. Of course, now I can pay towards whatever Alicia needs, I do.’
‘A good percentage of her disposable income,’ Costain interrupted. ‘First-class holiday in Florida last year for the three of them, four weeks.’
‘Cathy and Trevor,’ Kiley said, ‘they haven’t had children of their own?’
Victoria lifted her gaze from Kiley’s face towards the window, where a fly was buzzing haphazardly against the glass. ‘She can’t. I mean, I suppose she could try IVF. But, no, she can’t have children of her own.’
Kiley let the moment settle. ‘And Alicia?’
Victoria’s lower lip slid over the upper and the water glass tipped from hand and knee onto the floor. ‘She thinks I’m her auntie, of course. What else?’
Adrian reached out for her as she ran but she swerved around him and slammed the bedroom door.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘I think,’ said Kiley, ‘I need a drink.’
Victoria had been seeing Paul Broughton ever since her fifteenth birthday. Broughton, twenty-three years old, a butcher boy in Leytonstone by day, by night the drummer in a band which might have been the Verve if the Verve hadn’t already existed. A nice East London line on post-Industrial grime and angst. With heavily amplified guitars. After a gig at Walthamstow Assembly Rooms, he and Victoria got careless — either that, or Broughton’s timing was off.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ he said when Victoria told him. ‘What d’you think you’re gonna do? Get rid of it, of course.’
She didn’t waste words on him again. She talked to her mum and her mum, who had some experience in these things, told her not to worry, they’d find a way. Which of them first had the idea about asking Cathy, they could never be sure. Nor how Cathy persuaded Trevor. But there was big sister, half nine to half five in the greetings-card shop and hating every minute. Victoria wore looser clothes, avoided public showers; her sister padded herself out, chucked in her job, practised walking with splayed legs and pain in the lower back. They chose the name together from a book. After the birth — like shelling peas, the midwife said — Victoria held the baby, kissed her close, and handed her across, a smear of blood and mucus on her cheek. Still, sometimes when she woke, she felt a baby’s breath pass warm across her face.
As a Wimbledon junior, she reached the semi-finals before dropping a set, strode out to take the final, as she thought, by right, and went down two and love to the LTA’s new white hope in thirty minutes flat. Costain, who had been monitoring Victoria’s progress, waited till the hurt had eased and offered her a contract, sole representation, which her mother, of course, had to sign on her behalf. Costain’s play: retreat, lie low, for now leave domestic competition alone; he financed winters in Australia, the United States. Wait till they’ve forgotten who you are then hit them smack between the eyes.
So far it had worked.
‘I assume you don’t want to pay?’ Kiley said to Costain. Victoria was still in the bedroom, door locked.
‘Quarter of a million? No, thanks!’
‘But you’d pay something?’
Costain shrugged and pursed his lips; of course he would.
‘Sooner or later, you know it’ll come out.’
‘Of course. I just want to be able to manage it, that’s all. And now… the timing… you can imagine what this company’s going to be saying about their precious image. If they don’t walk away completely, and I think they might, they’ll strip what they’re offering back down to what we’re getting now. Or worse.’
‘You couldn’t live with that?’
‘I don’t want to live with that.’
‘All right, all right. When are they getting in touch again?’
‘Five this evening.’
Kiley looked at his watch. One hour fifteen to go. ‘Try and stall them, buy another twenty-four hours.’
‘They’ll never wear it.’
‘Tell them if they want payment in full, they don’t have any choice.’
‘And if they still say no?’
Kiley rose to his feet. ‘In the event the shit does hit the fan, I assume you’ve damage limitation planned.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you should make sure your plan’s in place.’
‘So what did you think of her?’ Kate asked. ‘Ms Teen Sensation.’
‘I liked her.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
They were lying, half-undressed, across the bed, Kate picking her way through an article by Naomi Klein, seeking something with which to disagree in print. Kiley had been reading one of the Chandlers Kate had bought him for his birthday — give you some idea of how a private eye’s supposed to think — and liking it well enough. Although it was still a book. Before that, they had been making love.
‘You fancied her, that’s what you mean?’
‘No. I liked her.’
‘You didn’t fancy her?’
‘Kate…’
‘What?’ But she was laughing and Kiley grinned back and shook his head and she shifted so that one of her legs rested high across his and he began to stroke her shoulder and her back.
‘You got your extra twenty-four hours,’ Kate said.
‘Apparently.’
‘Is that going to be enough?’
‘If it’s someone close, someone obvious, then, yes. But if it’s somebody outside the loop, there’s no real chance.’
‘And he knows that, Costain?’
Kiley nodded. ‘I’m sure he does.’
‘In which case, why not involve the police?’
‘Because the minute he does, someone inside the force will sell him out to the media before tomorrow’s first edition. You should know that better than me.’
‘Jack,’ she said, smiling, ‘you’ll do what you can.’ And rolled from her side on to her back.
Victoria’s mum, Lesley, was a dead ringer for Christine McVie. The singer from Fleetwood Mac. Remember? Not the skinny young one with the Minnie Mouse voice, but the other one, older, more mature. Dyed blonde hair and lived-in face and a voice that spoke of sex and forty cigarettes a day; the kind of woman you might fancy rotten if you were fifteen, which was what Kiley had been at the time, and you spotted her or someone like her behind the counter in the local chemist or driving past in one of those white vans delivering auto parts, nicotine at her finger ends and oil on her overalls. Rumours. Kiley alone upstairs in his room, listening to the record again and again. Rolling from side to side on the bed, trying to keep his hands to himself.
‘Won’t you come in?’ Lesley Clarke said. She was wearing a leisure suit in pale mauve, gold slippers with a small heel. Dark red fingernails. She didn’t have a cigarette in her hand, but had stubbed it out, Kiley thought, when
