34
The club Kit went to was all tricked out in black and blood-red, big gold signs screaming UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT! outside the entrance, doormen ushering people inside, the bass beat of the music so loud that it shook the strobe-lit dance floor where go-go dancers gyrated in devil horns in large gold cages suspended from a coal-black ceiling. Fake flame machines blew licking fronds of what looked like fire up the walls.
The place was packed. Kit fought his way to the bar, ordered the pitiful half a shandy that was going to last him all night. He turned with people jostling him out of the way, and some joker jogged his arm. He decanted his drink over the front of a girl of almost birdlike delicacy, with striking white-blonde hair. She was wearing a white lace minidress that revealed perfect legs.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she burst out, swiping at the front of her dress.
‘Sorry,’ said Kit, and then he did a double-take. Looked again. And thought, Shit, it’s her.
She was staring right back at him.
They both said it at the same time: ‘Don’t I know you?’
‘I’m Bianca,’ she told him half an hour later, after she’d gone upstairs to change out of the soiled minidress and returned. They were sitting in one of the little alcoves, her with a gin and tonic in front of her on the low black-lacquered table, Kit with a fresh shandy.
‘Tony,’ said Kit, remembering the bachelor drill. If you’re going to shag her, you don’t give your own name. What if there are comebacks? You’d be a fool to give out your real name. And he fully intended to shag her if he could. He was desperate to do that. ‘I’m Tony Mobley.’
‘Hi, Tony,’ she said, and smiled and held out a hand.
‘Hi yourself, Bianca,’ he said, and clasped her slender white hand in his larger, darker one.
Oh yes, he wanted to get her into bed as soon as he possibly could. He couldn’t stop staring at her. The minidress had been replaced by another, also white: this one was soft sheeny satin, briefly cut without sleeves and with a big scooped neck and a high hemline. It clung to every curve. There was a teardrop pearl on a silver chain nestling in the shadowy hollow between her breasts. He wanted to rip the dress open and see her. He wanted, right now, to take her somewhere quiet, push her dress up out of the way and fuck her brains out, he was consumed by lust like he had never known before.
‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘In a car, in London. In my head I called you the Bride. Because your hair’s almost white, and you’re so pale…’ Jesus, am I sounding like a cunt or what?
‘I saw you too,’ said Bianca, thinking: You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life. But she couldn’t say that. She was embarrassed to. She felt like someone had snatched her breath away, hollowed out her stomach and left an echoing void there. She’d seen him just once, on that terrible day, the day of Tito’s funeral, and she’d thought she would never see him again. Now here he was, talking to her, and she felt she’d lost all her usual panache. She was cooclass="underline" everyone said so. That frosty virgin queen image was something she was always careful to promote. But now, almost shivering with excitement, she was struggling to maintain even an iota of it.
‘What were you doing in London?’ she asked.
Watch yourself, thought Kit. All right, he wanted her. Badly. More than he had ever wanted a woman before, including Gilda. This was no slow burn. This was immediate and powerful, something he had never experienced before, something entirely new to him – and fucking scary, actually. But he wasn’t about to blow his cover. ‘Business, that’s all. I go there sometimes.’
‘What line of business are you in?’
‘Oh, restaurants, security… all sorts, really.’
‘A bit of an entrepreneur,’ said Bianca.
‘That’s right.’ Kit looked around. ‘And you run this place. Is that what you were doing in London? You have other clubs there?’
Bianca shook her head. ‘I only run this one. I was up there for family stuff.’ Her smile faded.
Kit remembered she’d been wearing a black veil, travelling in a long black limo. Sad family stuff, he thought. Then the beat of the music slowed, the lights dipped: now Gladys Knight was crooning.
‘I love this song,’ said Bianca as ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ filled the club with smoky, soulful tones.
‘Want to dance?’ asked Kit. He wanted to hold her. Couldn’t understand it, marvelled at it, but that was a fact: he couldn’t wait to touch this woman, body to body.
She looked into his eyes. ‘Yeah. Why not?’
And then they were on the dance floor with all the other smooching couples, shuffling around, her arms around his neck, his hands on the back of her waist, pulling her in tight against his body. His nose was nuzzling in at the sweet, fragrant base of her throat, and he was thinking This is heaven.
He pulled her in closer, closer.
And then he realized he had an erection, and it was pressing against her. Shit, he thought. He eased himself back from her, and Bianca lifted her head from his shoulder and looked directly into his eyes.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said.
35
By Wednesday morning Simon’s father, Sir Bradley Collins, had formally identified his son’s body. Simon’s mother had been so hysterical the doctor had prescribed a strong dose of tranquilisers, and Daisy couldn’t do it, she was too shocked, too distraught.
Why she should be in floods of tears over Simon’s death was beyond her. She had never really loved him, any more than he loved her. Theirs had been a marriage of convenience; Simon had wanted to marry into the Bray line and reap all the rewards that ties to the late Lord Cornelius Bray would net him. For Daisy, marriage to Simon had been an escape from her own wild and turbulent youth, a safe harbour after stormy seas. But aside from producing two beautiful baby boys, the marriage had been a disaster. Daisy’s free spirit meant she could never be the dutiful wife that Simon desired, and he had punished her for it.
Divorced and glad of it, Daisy was amazed at the anguish she was going through now. Whatever else he might have been, Simon was the twins’ father. Now her boys had been denied the chance to know their father, and her tears were as much for them as for her ex-husband. Never in her wildest dreams would she have believed that he was capable of suicide. But according to the police, he had gone home after his visit to Marlow, composed a brief note to his parents saying he was sorry to end it this way, and then he had hanged himself from a beam in the garage. The cleaner, passing the open garage door on her way up to the house the next morning, had seen him hanging there and called the police.
Her initial reaction when the police broke the news had been, No, this must be a mistake, he can’t be dead. But then Sir Bradley called in at Ruby’s on his way home from the hospital morgue; one look at his grief-stricken face, suddenly aged and riven with sorrow, told Daisy that there was no mistake. Simon was dead.
‘My poor boy,’ said Sir Bradley, his eyes bleak with pain. ‘If only he’d talked to me, if only he’d told me he was in such despair…’
Ruby sat him down, gave him a brandy, while Daisy stood looking at him in stunned disbelief.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He was here that evening, telling Ruby about the new contract and how well he was doing. He’d just spent a day with the babies. He was happy.’
‘He certainly seemed fine,’ sighed Ruby. ‘But obviously he wasn’t.’
‘For God’s sake, what does it matter?’ Sir Bradley burst out. ‘He’s dead!’