Fast Friends (65 page)

No chance, sweetheart, thought
Caroline, kissing the top of
his head as she reached for her denim jacket hanging on the
back of his chair. Nico certainly wore the look of a man
in the
throes of a tortuous affair — he’d
scarcely spoken to her at all
this week — but she wasn’t going to give
him the satisfaction of retaliating. She was behaving so bloody perfectly that
no way would he be able to shunt any blame on to her.

‘Joke,’ she said, taking a sip of his coffee and
deliberately not commenting on the fact that it was heavily spiked. ‘Cecilia
and I are going to the Sanctuary. I don’t know when I’ll be home.’

‘
Fine.’ Nico nodded absently, resuming his scan
of the racing
pages. He had been surprised
when Caroline and Cecilia had struck up a tentative friendship, but now they
met each other
for shopping expeditions or lunches almost every week. He
suspected that they enjoyed gossiping about
Mac and himself;
it gave them a chance to air their grievances while at
the same
time presenting a glamorous, united
front to the people who
saw and envied
them their spectacular riches. It was too much
to hope that Caroline
might really be meeting a lover, he thought with genuine regret.

Madge
Pargeter, who had been busily hoovering the master bedroom upstairs, paused to
kick a pair of knickers out of its
path, then left the cleaner running
while she massaged her
rheumaticky spine with
both hands and watched from the
bedroom window as young Mrs Coletto
slammed the front door shut behind her and stalked over to the dark green
Ferrari parked askew on the gravel drive.

Poor Mrs Coletto, thought Madge with a
touch of indigna
tion. That pink
mini-dress she was wearing now had cost almost three hundred pounds – she had
found the receipt in the carrier
bag only
yesterday – yet for all her ritzy silk underwear, fast
cars and fancy clothes she still wasn’t happy. It
just went to
show.

Madge had cleaned some houses in her
time. She’d seen it
all;
big noisy families who seemed happy at first but who
existed on violent arguments and plate
throwing; married
couples who weren’t
happy at all unless they were both cheating on each other; even one household
where the man was knocking
off his wife, his
step-daughter and the baby’s nanny all at the
same time.

Knowing what was going on in other people’s lives was what
made the job interesting, and she hadn’t quite figured out the Colettos yet,
which intrigued her.

Having applied for the job at her
daughter Shona’s insistence
– Nico was her current all-time favourite rock singer – Madge
was still, after almost three weeks,
sussing out the situation.
Slowly resuming her cleaning, she considered the facts so far.
Mr and Mrs Coletto never seemed to argue, which was odd.
Everyone had arguments. Mrs C was unhappy, but she
had
phases of trying too hard to
please, whereas
he
scarcely seemed
to notice either way, as if he didn’t even care. It seemed likely
to Madge that he had other women on the go yet she
had no
proof of this.

Funny family, she mused, bending down
to pick up an
emerald
earring caught in the thick pile of the carpet. I give
‘em six months at the most before the lawyers move in and
the real fighting begins. I’ll settle for my Albert and our Shona and Keith any
day.

Downstairs, unable to stand the
inactivity a moment longer,
Nico threw
aside the
Standard
and went into the sitting-room, picking up the phone
and punching out Camilla’s number before he could think of a reason why he
shouldn’t. Mrs Pargeter, the
nosy old witch,
was upstairs, safely out of the way. He knew
that Caroline deliberately
chose cleaning women who were so ancient and unattractive he couldn’t possibly
fancy them and he found it vaguely amusing, but she also took pains to get the
old
crones on her side, presumably so that
if he did do anything
wrong they would immediately tell her. Right now
he felt too guilty to find that funny.

Not really guilty though, he amended, picking up and
glancing at
a postcard which had arrived that morning from
Montserrat. Shaun, his drummer, had scrawled ‘Born to rum’
across the back. No, he wasn’t really guilty, he
just needed to
sort certain matters out in advance. As soon as he
explained
everything to Camilla, and as soon
as she told him what
he needed to hear
– if, of course, she told him what he needed
to hear – he would square everything with Caroline. She
could leave this sad, loveless marriage
practically a million
airess in her
own right, for God’s sake . . . and then be free to
find a man who
would
make her happy. How
could that be
wrong?

‘
Hello?’ The sound of Camilla’s voice, slightly muffled and
at the same
time echoing, convinced him that he was right. He realized how tightly his
fingers were gripping the receiver and deliberately relaxed them.

‘
Hi, it’s me.’

More muffled noises – she sounded as
if she was changing
the phone from one ear
to the other – then: ‘Who’s me?’

Nico’s heart sank. He would recognize Camilla’s voice
anytime,
anywhere in the world. Why didn’t she know
his
voice, for heaven’s sake?

‘
The wasp killer,’ he said lightly. ‘You haven’t paid your
bill.’

‘Nico!’ At least she sounded pleased to hear from him.
‘I’m
sorry – my ears are full of shampoo. You sound all bubbly.’

‘Have I got you out of the shower?’

Camilla giggled. ‘I’m in the bath.
Isn’t it decadent?
Listen . .

As Nico heard the splashing of water his imagination ran
wild. The idea of talking to Camilla while she was lying naked
in a hot
scented bath was incredibly erotic. Suddenly it became easier to say what he
had to say.

‘
Sounds fun,’ he told her, smiling into the phone. ‘Listen,
I’m leaving for Montserrat in a couple
of days, and I’d really
like to see you before I go. Are you free this
afternoon?’

Camilla hesitated for only a moment. ‘I
can be, yes. Where
shall I meet you?’

He hadn’t properly thought this out. ‘I could come over to
you,’ he said hopefully, but this time she didn’t hesitate for even
a second.

‘
No good, I’m afraid. There’ll be . . . people here. I could
always
drive over to your house though.’

‘That’s out too,’ said Nico, admiring her innocence. It
would never occur to Camilla that he might not want Caroline to knowhe was
seeing her. And he certainly wasn’t going to give Mata Pargeter the pleasure of
reporting Camilla’s visit back to her.

Then he remembered Cino’s restaurant,
hidden away in a
leafy corner of
Kensington. He could reserve their private
dining-room
and ensure their privacy for the afternoon. And
since Camilla had picked him up from there on several occasions
when
she had been working for him, she knew where it was.

‘Cino’s restaurant,’ he said, crossing his fingers and
praying
that the room hadn’t already been
booked. ‘I’ll meet you there at one o’clock and we’ll have lunch in the back
room – it’ll be
more private.’

‘
I remember it,’ Camilla
told him, and he heard a splash.
‘Damn,
the shampoo’s fallen into the bath. One o’clock, then.
I’ll be the one
reeking of peaches and almonds.’

‘I can’t wait,’ murmured Nico, already imagining how she
would smell. ‘Bye, Cami. I’ll see you there.’

Interesting,
thought Madge Pargeter, carefully replacing the receiver upstairs. Listening in
on other people’s telephone
conversations
wasn’t something she made a habit of, but once
in a while it proved
almost irresistible. And very, very occasionally, even profitable .. .

The traffic was appalling as Camilla drove through Belgravia.
If she was a little late getting there Nico would just have to
wait, but at least it was better than allowing him to turn up at
her house,
where Roz and Natalie were due to arrive at around
two o’clock. She was pleased that there was no longer any
animosity between Roz and herself, but Nico had
indirectly
been the catalyst for at least part of the feud while it had
lasted
and she wasn’t yet up to a three-way
confrontation between
them.

And Nico didn’t yet know about Natalie.

Still, thought Camilla as she opened the sunroof and
breathed
in the scent of hot tarmac and
exhaust fumes, it would be
interesting when she returned home to see how
Roz and Natalie
were getting on together. Roz
had booked them both in at an
hotel off the Bayswater Road, but Camilla
had persuaded her to cancel the rooms and stay with her instead during their
visits to London. She enjoyed the company, and it seemed ridiculous to waste
money on an hotel when she had empty rooms in her own house. Also, since she
had been the one who had persuaded Roz to meet her daughter she felt it
necessary now to support her through what couldn’t be a particularly easy time.

But she had done the right thing, she
decided, in keeping
Nico
away from the house. According to Roz, Natalie wor
shipped Nico and was pestering her to
see him, and for this
amongst other reasons Camilla had left a note with the back
door key – hidden in their
pre-arranged spot – saying that she
was out
visiting Zoë, and that she would be back by four at the latest.

Because the sunroof was open, the crash when it came
sounded
like an explosion. Camilla jammed her
foot on the brake and
the car slewed sideways to a vicious halt at the
kerb.

Terrified, appalled by the suddenness of the accident, she
clutched at her seatbelt with frozen fingers
and stared at the crushed, metallic blue tangle of metal that a second ago had
been
a new Escort XR3i. The lorry into which it had careered
head-on had ground to a stop beside the traffic-lights with only
a
slight dent in its front bumper.

Both vehicles were less than twenty feet away from her and
the abrupt
silence following the crash rang in her ears.

Without even thinking, Camilla unlocked her seatbelt and
stepped out of the car on legs which were
shuddering and
jerky. The Escort’s windscreen was an opaque maze of
cracked
glass, but there was blood on the
driver’s window and she
could make out
the dark outline of a head slumped sideways
against it.

Reaching the car at the same moment as
the lorry driver,
who was unhurt but
visibly shaken, she saw that the man inside
was
bleeding heavily from a head wound, and that his arms
were flailing as,
panic stricken and confused, he attempted to escape from the crushed confines
of his prison.

‘He jumped the lights – I couldn’t avoid him,’ blustered
the
ashen-faced, overweight lorry driver,
pulling at the passenger
door.

‘
Leave it,’ said Camilla
automatically, but although the
door was too buckled to open, the sharp
movement brought a
shower of glass down from
the windscreen on to the man
inside.

‘
Call an ambulance,’
she said, as other people began to
converge
around the car. And moving around to the other side
she opened the
passenger door and climbed in, not even noticing
the cushion of glass fragments which tore at her stockings and
dug
into the backs of her legs.

‘
You’ll be all right,’
she said in a low voice to the injured
man,
taking his hands in hers and holding them firmly against
his chest. He was wearing a pink and white striped
golfing
sweater splattered with dark
blood, and his dark curly hair was
so like Matt’s that for a confused
moment she thought it must surely be a dream.