And now it was decaffeinated coffee table time. Alicia was cradling the baby with one arm and using her free hand to leaf through the magazines. Abigail’s tiny fingers made a grab for the nearest page and scrunched it into a rudimentary origami design. ‘Abigail, no. Mummy’s reading.’ There was a sound of glossy paper rending as Alicia prised the chubby little fist away.
Lulu brandished another magazine. ‘The second issue of Bellini,’ she chirruped. ‘I’m going in to see them. Amanda says they pay really well.’
Alicia glanced at the cover. I caught a glimpse of it too, and wished I hadn’t; it was a larger-than-life close-up of a heavily made-up model winking at the camera. It gave me the heebie-jeebies whenever I saw anyone winking; it never failed to remind me of things I preferred to forget. I looked away and counted slowly to ten — my well-tested method for wiping unwanted images from my mind. When I looked back, the magazine lay open on Alicia’s lap and the picture was no longer visible. She was studying the masthead on the contents page. ‘Bellini,’ she cooed, rocking the baby gently. ‘Bellini… Never heard of it.’
‘It’s a champagne cocktail,’ Lulu said helpfully.
Alicia looked as though she were biting back a sharp comment. ‘Up to a point, Lu,’ she said, in that tone she sometimes used, the one which periodically reminded me why I quite liked her. She flicked through the pages, eventually coming across something which made her stop and flick back. ‘But these girls are all topless,’ she said.
‘So?’ I said. ‘It’s no worse than The Sun. Or Vogue.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘When I say topless, I mean they don’t have any heads.’
I was about to lean over and see what she was talking about when Lulu snatched the magazine away from her and riffled through it. ‘It’s all very surreal,’ she said grandly. ‘Surreal’ was one of her favourite words. ‘Look at this,’ she said, flattening the pages at what appeared to be a fashion feature about lingerie. From where I was sitting it didn’t look very surreal at all. She and Alicia bent their heads down over it and started to make bitchy remarks about the models.
I was dying for a cigarette, but I was stuck in a room with four non-smokers. My thoughts turned to alcohol instead. I had drained my glass of wine, and no-one was breaking their neck to offer me a refill, but there was a bottle of cheap brandy sitting untouched on the table. Duncan had bought it some months before, duty free from Barcelona airport, but he never went near alcohol these days, and Lulu drank spirits only when she was trying to impress somebody. Alicia didn’t want her milk contaminated with noxious substances, and Jack was sticking to moderate quantities of white wine so that later on he would be able to point the car in the direction of their flat, which was all of two hundred yards away.
No-one was paying me any attention, so I poured myself a large measure and gulped it, slooshing the liquid around my mouth so it wouldn’t inflict third-degree burns on my palate. Jack and Duncan were talking about Ferraris again. I began to wish I hadn’t stayed.
The New Vague warbling stopped. Lulu was sifting distractedly through her pile of magazines and didn’t notice. She was looking for something. ‘Duncan?’ she asked. ‘Where’s the first issue?’ She raised her voice. ‘Duncan?’
Duncan broke off his conversation.
‘Bellini,’ Lulu insisted. ‘Where did you put the first one?’
‘It’s somewhere around.’
‘I want to show Alicia.’
Duncan paused, and then he said, ‘You can show her another time.’ There was a note in his voice which hadn’t been there before. Oh-oh, I thought. Watch out, Lulu.
‘Duncan,’ she said.
Usually he did whatever she asked — anything for a quiet life. But now he was glowering. I hadn’t seen him so edgy and bad-tempered in ages, but I really didn’t mind, not if it was directed at Lulu. She was pouting again, but with her chin thrust out, determined to stand her ground in front of Jack and Alicia, who were both looking slightly embarrassed.
‘Please, Dunc,’ she said in her whiniest voice. ‘Duncan Doughnut.’ This was her pet name for him. He had never actually said that he hated it, but you could sometimes see the muscle in his jaw twitching.
For one glorious second I thought he was going to gouge her eyes out, but instead he sighed, and got to his feet. ‘I think it’s somewhere in the darkroom,’ he said.
Lulu laughed triumphantly and clapped her hands together. ‘Alicia, wait till you see this,’ she said. ‘It’s really gross.’
As he went past my chair, Duncan spun on his heel and looked me straight in the eye. The effect was like a mild electric shock to the base of my spine. I got the message immediately and leapt to my feet. ‘Now?’
He nodded, all of a sudden looking ten years older. ‘Might as well get it over with,’ he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. Then he raised his voice. ‘We’ve just got to go over this stuff. It won’t take long. A couple of minutes.’
‘Can’t it wait?’ asked Lulu.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it can’t.’
Jack and Alicia exchanged glances. They thought I was a pest, hanging around Duncan all the time. Lulu was acting like an abandoned puppy. I permitted myself to flash a quick grin in her direction as I followed Duncan into the office. Once the door was shut behind us, I toyed with the idea of making loud and interesting party noises, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood for japes.
The office was cramped, with no windows; there was barely enough room for a desk and filing cabinet. One of the walls was taken up by a sliding door; Duncan pulled this open and we went through into the darkroom, which was only slightly bigger than the office and stank of stale chemicals. He tugged a cord and the light came on, and somewhere an extractor fan whirred into life. He dragged a stool away from the bench and insisted I sit down. While he was rummaging through the contents of a filing tray, I twisted round to peer into the sink behind me; it was full of black-and-white twelve-by-tens which eddied slowly as the water level repeatedly rose and fell. The topmost picture was of a nude girl wearing a hat shaped like a dead seagull.
I asked, ‘So what’s all this about?’ but Duncan ignored me and went on rummaging. After a minute or so, he found what he was looking for. I just had time to clock the Bellini logo before he turned to a page somewhere in the middle, smoothing it flat on the bench in front of me.
I looked, and my blood pressure leapt a few notches. The words Night People! were printed in dripping crimson across the top of the page. It was some sort of fashion spread, glistening with saturated colour. The model, of course, was wearing black. It was a dress cut low at the neck, made out of that clinging fabric you could only wear if you were prepared to spend half your waking life in the gym. But the dress itself wasn’t so extraordinary; Lulu had a dozen or so like it in various shades of pink. What was extraordinary was the rest of the picture.
The model’s face was dead white, and it appeared frozen with shock, which wasn’t so surprising since somebody, not entirely in frame, was ramming a sharp stick through her chest. The dark fabric of the dress was gleaming even darker where the stick went in. A trickle of blood ran from one corner of her immaculately painted mouth. Her brilliant teeth were bared in a snarl, and there was no doubt that two of them were fangs.
I read the accompanying column of text out loud. ‘Smart vamps only come out at night in the slinkiest of fabrics, but stakes are high when the claret begins to flow and the chips are down.’ Beneath this was a list of labels and prices.