“Come with me,” he said. He led me to the far end of the carpeted hall. I’d never been down here before. It was a smaller sitting room, almost like a waiting room—chairs and sofas around the edges of the room, a potted plant in the corner. A desk near the door. Fitz sat on one of the chairs and I sank gratefully down into the chair next to his.
“I’ve been having some problems with a guy at work,” I began. “He recognized me here a few weeks ago, and he’s been making it really difficult for me there.”
Fitz’s face was impassive. He was waiting for me to get to the part where it became his problem.
“He wanted me to do a private dance for him but he wasn’t prepared to pay for it, so Helena got him to leave. I didn’t think he’d come back, but he’s here, now.”
Still no response. I was starting to feel like I was making a huge mistake.
“He just booked me for a dance and I did it, so I guess he’s changed his mind about paying. But he’s staying in the club, he’s hanging around, and I don’t like it. I think he’s going to try and follow me home.”
I had nothing to support this theory, but nevertheless I’d finally gotten to the part that concerned Fitz. While I was working for him, I was his responsibility, and anyone seeking to disrupt that easy relationship was not going to be allowed to continue.
“What’s he look like?” he asked.
“Tall, bald, fat, light gray suit, glasses.”
“Sounds like a charmer.”
I smiled and looked down at my bare knees. “I’m not easily scared, Fitz. I can take care of myself normally. I don’t like asking for help.”
“I know that,” he said softly. “But this is bad for business, whether he’s paid up or not. I can’t have him distracting you while you’re at work here. I’ll make sure he doesn’t follow you home. All right?”
I nodded gratefully and stood. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry if I interrupted your meeting.”
“No worries.”
I went back to the end of the hall and turned at the top of the stairs. He was watching me go. Checking me out, or making sure I wasn’t going to try and nose around some of the other rooms? I still wasn’t sure he trusted me.
I was just in time for my last dance. I was tired, so I made it a slow one, erotic, taking it about as far as it was possible to go without another person. There, at the front of the audience, looking pink and sweaty, stood Dunkerley. At the back, in one of the VIP booths, Fitz, Nicks, and Dylan. They were talking, helping themselves from what looked like a half-full bottle of Russian import vodka and watching me.
When it was over, I blew a kiss to the few men who were still sitting over to the left, despite the fact that it was nearly dawn and they should have been at home long ago, tucked up in their beds next to their wives. I went back into the dressing room and got changed into my jeans and sneakers and fleece, wiped off the makeup, and tied my hair in a ponytail behind my head. I said goodnight to the other girls who were still there, and let myself out the back way.
The backstreet was quiet and gray with the approaching dawn. There was no sign of Dunkerley, or anyone else for that matter. I’d been kind of hoping for an escort to take me safely home, maybe Dylan, or even Fitz—maybe I’d even have been all right with Nicks, under the circumstances—but there was nobody.
I walked around to the front to find a cab.
At work on Monday, they told us Dunkerley was out sick, that he was going to be out of work for a while. There was a lot of gossip about it, of course. I heard a suggestion that Human Resources had put him on leave for some sort of harassment, and that he’d been asked to resign. There was even a rumor going around that he was genuinely ill, seriously ill, and that he might not be able to come back.
All I knew was that I didn’t have to see his smug fat face again, and for that I was profoundly grateful.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jim Carling came with me to look for bathtubs. I was thankful for this; despite the sharp words in the morning, I was starting to really like Jim. Aside from ferrying me cheerfully everywhere I wanted to go, he kept up the conversation about boat ownership and whether it would be possible to make your way around the world in a boat of this size, and, if so, where would you go? We had fun with that one. Jim wanted to go to the Far East. I said I wasn’t going to go anywhere in the Indian Ocean because of the threat of Somali pirates. All of this was arbitrary anyway because I had never driven a boat before, much less negotiated the open sea.
We didn’t come back with a tub, although there were some reasonable ones in a salvage yard in Sittingbourne. I was on the lookout for a hip bathtub, maybe even a genuine Victorian one, something I could manage to connect to the boat’s plumbing without too much hassle.
We stopped and had lunch in a café at a garden center—baked potato for me, salad for him—with pots of tea. It felt very domestic, shopping together on a weekend.
“Is there anywhere else you need to go?” he asked.
I laughed. “You don’t have to be my taxi,” I said. “It’s very kind of you, but I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”
We drove home to the marina, and, because it seemed like the most appropriate thing to do with the fading afternoon, we went back to bed. The boat was chilly. I took him by the hand and into the bedroom. He was skillful and patient, his big hands decisive and firm.
By the time we’d tired ourselves out, it was dark. I went to the galley and lit the stove to warm the boat up, and then came back to bed. I thought for a moment he was asleep but he moved to let me under the covers, and pulled me against him.
“It should start to warm up soon,” I said. “The stove’s really efficient when it gets going.”
“Mm,” he said. “I should think about going home.”
“Really?”
“I don’t have any clean clothes. And I need to do stuff at home—laundry, you know.”
“Oh.”
He was kissing my arm, making the hairs on it rise in anticipation. “You could come home and stay with me.”
“No,” I said.
“Why?”
I laughed. “I don’t sleep well on dry land.”
“You don’t have to actually sleep.”
It was at that moment that I realized. I wanted to tell him. Maybe not all of it, but enough to make him understand.
“I have to stay on the boat.”
“Why?”
“The men who came on the boat and tied me up—I think they were looking for something. If I leave the boat, they’ll come back.”
“What were they looking for?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that they turned the boat upside down, and I assume that means they were looking for something.”
He sat up in bed, bunching the pillows behind him, and turned on the light overhead. “If you don’t know what they were looking for,” he said with impeccable logic, “how do you know they didn’t find it?”
I blinked at him.
“You have to tell me, Genevieve.”
“No, I don’t.”
He shook his head slowly. “God,” he said, more to himself than to me, “why am I even here? This is fucking crazy.”
“Look,” I said, trying to comfort him, “I’m not scared of them. Not really. They are bad people, but I’ve dealt with them before. I just need to figure out a way to get whatever it is off my boat so that I’m not a target for them anymore.”
“Caddy Smith,” he said, “you knew her, didn’t you?”
I nodded my head.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You said her name was Candace.”
“Don’t play dumb, Genevieve. You knew it was her when you saw her in the water. You lied in your statement.”
“No, I didn’t. It was dark. I saw a body. It looked like her, but I wasn’t sure.”
“You’ve got to tell me, Genevieve. What do you mean, ‘you’ve dealt with them before’? Who are they? What do they want from yo
u?”
I didn’t answer.
He got out of bed and started to collect his clothes, which, once again, were scattered all over my bedroom floor. I watched him silently, wondering which part of the whole bloody mess had sparked off this sudden change in mood. Just because I didn’t want to make everything worse? Just because I didn’t want to tell him about all the shit at the Barclay? What was he planning to do, anyway—go and ask Fitz nicely to leave me alone?
He was nearly fully dressed now, pulling his sweater over his head.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going home,” he said. “Crazy as it is, the offer’s still there if you want to come with me. But I’m guessing you won’t.” He was so angry. And maybe he was disappointed in me, too. When he’d finished dressing, he came over to the bed and kissed me hard, fiercely, as if it might be the last time. I put my arms around his neck and tried to pull him back to bed but he wasn’t having any of that.
It was a kiss goodbye.
It was on my second visit to Fitz’s house that everything began to change, for all of us: for Fitz, for Dylan, for Caddy, and for me.
I’d been looking forward to it all week, not just because these weekends were going to be giving such an impressive boost to my savings, even if I hadn’t managed to negotiate a better pay deal for it—this time, Caddy had agreed to do the party with me.
Added to which, not having to deal with Dunkerley at work was a bonus. Gavin had been made our temporary manager, and it was pretty much like working for your best friend: we got on with things as we always had, but it felt more as though we were laughing about it instead of stepping over each other’s twitching bodies in the desperate fight to close deals.
It wasn’t Dylan who collected me that evening, but Nicks. He sat in the car outside until I was ready and stayed there; I let myself into the backseat and then we drove off into the traffic.
“Where’s Caddy?” I asked.
He moved his shoulders in some kind of lazy shrug and then barely said a word to me the whole trip. I plugged into my music and went over my moves in my head, planning where I could make tweaks, considering what I would do if the option arose for Fitz to bend the rules again. I’d kind of set the precedent now by doing it once; it was more or less accepted that I would be asked to do it again. No matter. The money was the important thing. If it got me closer to the boat, I was prepared to do it. And if he wanted me to go further still? No point worrying about it now. I would decide when the time came.
We pulled up to the rear of the house this time, and I went straight in through the back door to the kitchen. As before, the caterers were busy preparing food, a sit-down meal by the look of it.
I found a comfy chair in the corner and kept myself busy with a notebook I’d brought with me, full of plans and clippings from various boat magazines. I was so engrossed in it that I didn’t even notice Dylan until he was standing right beside me, eclipsing the light from the kitchen.
“Hi!” I said, removing an earbud. “I didn’t know you were here.”
He looked at me without expression. “You’re not on till later. They’re having dinner in the dining room in half an hour. Fitz wants to know if you’d like to join them.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope.”
“Just me?”
“You and a few others. There’s a seating plan.”
“Oh. Dylan, do you know where Caddy is? She’s supposed to be here, too.”
“She’s upstairs, I think.”
I accepted this without comment, pissed off that my evening of entertainment with my best buddy was not turning out quite the way I’d hoped.
“Am I sitting next to someone I should know about?” I said.
“You’re between Fitz and Leon Arnold.”
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Who’s Leon Arnold?”
He looked at me as though I’d asked the wrong question. “Owns a yacht. You’ll get on well with him. And if you don’t, you should pretend to. And be careful with him.”
“What do you mean, ‘be careful’?”
He took a moment to reply. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
There was no point pressing him for a more specific answer. It was another test, I realized. Good thing I’d brought enough outfits with me so that I could select something suitable for an evening meal. I went to the downstairs bathroom and got changed, put makeup on, and twisted my hair up into french pleat that I hoped looked classically elegant.
The dining room was empty but the table was laid for ten; through open doors on the other side I heard sounds of polite conversation, a woman’s laugh, so I went to the door cautiously and looked through.
They were all in there—Fitz and some other men, one of whom I recognized from the last party. There were women in there, too; I recognized a girl from the Barclay—Stella? She’d danced there a few times, but usually she worked at one of Fitz’s other clubs. And standing next to Fitz, resplendent in a jeweled black cocktail dress and a pair of killer heels, was Caddy. She gave me a little wave.
Three of the girls were on their own in a corner, giggling over some private joke. I saw Fitz cast a displeased glance over to them before resuming his conversation with the man to his right. I went over to the girls with a glass of champagne I’d lifted from the tray of a passing waitress and said to them quietly, “Ladies, aren’t you supposed to be mingling?”
Two of them looked worried, but one of them—an acid blonde with pale blue eyes—said, “Fuck’s it got to do with you?”
I treated her to a warm smile. “It doesn’t pay to piss Fitz off,” I said sweetly, “and he’s already shooting daggers at you. Just a bit of friendly advice.”
As I left them and headed for Fitz, the girls seemed to come to their senses and split from their cozy huddle, making their way toward the remaining guests.
“Viva,” Fitz said to me as I approached. “Come and meet Leon.”
Fitz slipped an arm around my waist and kissed my cheek as I shook Leon Arnold’s hand. He was maybe fifty, the same height as me, with a shaved head and capped teeth. A good suit, a diamond stud in one earlobe.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said. “I understand I’m the lucky girl who gets to sit next to you at dinner.”
He looked as though he might take a little warming up, but what the hell? I was already thinking of my potential bonus for taking care of Fitz’s girls and for softening up Mr. Arnold for whatever scheme Fitz had planned for him. What I hadn’t figured on, though, was the look Caddy was giving me. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking at me as though I were something she’d found on the sole of her shoe.
“Hey,” I said to her, as we filed in to dinner, “I was wondering where you were.”
“You’re sitting next to Fitz,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Dylan told me.”
I read something in her eyes, something she wasn’t telling me.
“What?” I said.
“Don’t get too close to them,” she said. “Don’t get close to either of them. Understand?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t seem to hear me. Whatever. This wasn’t the time or the place.
Over dinner, the topic of business seemed to be strictly off-limits. Stella told everybody about an audition she’d had to dance in a music video; one of the other men, a younger version of Fitz, told her he was looking for girls to appear as extras in a film he was producing. After that they were all over him.
I chatted with Leon Arnold over dinner, asked him about his yacht, about cruising around the islands in the Mediterranean. More than once I cast a glance in Fitz’s direction to check I was doing the right thing. He gave me a smile, which reassured me. The rest of the time he was busy talking to the man who was sitting on the other side of him, an older man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. Caddy seemed to have been tasked with entertaining him—she kept her focus on him and
away from me.
I managed to eat most of the soup and then picked at my dinner, pushing it around the plate even though it looked delicious—in any other circumstances I would have wolfed it and asked for seconds. Not eating allowed me to devote all my attention to Leon, who, despite his yacht and his Rolex Oyster and his unconscionable amount of money, was decidedly dull.
Stella was sitting on the other side of Leon, and when her attempts at enlivening the conversation with the dark-haired man on her right failed, she turned her attention to Leon and left me momentarily free to check out the men I’d be dancing for later.
“How’s your food?” Fitz asked me.
I felt my face flush a little. “It’s delicious,” I said. “I’m hoping there might be some leftovers for when I’ve finished dancing.”
He smiled and under the table his hand made contact with my thigh.
“What time do you want us to start?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We’ve got business to discuss, so . . . after that. I’ll send one of the lads for you when we’re ready. Kitten’s going to do some private dances, if they want them.”
“Caddy isn’t pole dancing?”
He gave me an amused smile. “No, Viva. You’re here for that.”
I tried a different tack. “Thank you for inviting me for dinner,” I said.
“You’re good at this,” he said.
“At what?”
“At knowing what they like. And you worked things out with the girls earlier. I appreciate that.”
I glanced down the table at the three blondes, who were animatedly discussing their potential careers in the music industry with the three young men.
The girls were all there for sex, I realized. It came to me in a moment, even though I’d probably known it all along. When Dylan had said to me last time, “You’re the only one dancing,” I’d thought that meant there would be girls from the club serving drinks, maybe doing lap dances, but when I hadn’t seen any other girls, I didn’t give it another thought. Now, I realized, they’d all been upstairs; and the last time, while I was being felt up by Kenny and dancing for the other clients of Fitz’s who’d gathered here, the remaining men had probably been upstairs being entertained by the other girls.