“You know,” I said to Fitz, “you should think about diversifying the club a bit.”
Another amused smile. “Diversifying?”
“You could do a couple of ladies’ nights—get some men in to dance as well as girls. And maybe a burlesque night, something with a bit more”—I searched for the most appropriate word—“widespread appeal.”
“Ah, but widespread appeal means reduced profits.”
“But you must admit, you’re serving a very limited pool of customers at the moment,” I said. “Think about all the people who wouldn’t dream of setting foot in the club as it is now. Couples. Girls’ nights out. Bacherlorette parties, if you like.”
Leon Arnold leaned over me, one arm heavy across my shoulders. He smelled of whiskey and aftershave. “You want to watch yourself with this one, Fitz, old boy,” he said. “She’s gonna take over your empire.”
My reply was swift. “No, I want to stick to what I’m good at—dancing for gorgeous men like you, Leon.”
Fitz laughed then, and Caddy gave me a sharp look from the other side of the table.
As soon as dinner was over and I could excuse myself, I went back to the kitchen, found a bottle of water to try to dilute the half-glass of champagne and the half-glass of red wine I’d drunk, and took it with me to the downstairs bathroom. Dylan was waiting at the breakfast bar, munching on a dish of nachos.
“Don’t they feed you properly?” I asked cheekily.
He looked up. “I thought they were going to take you upstairs, with the rest of the tramps,” he teased back.
“I’d better get changed,” I said. “Come in and talk to me if you like.”
Dylan shook his head. “Fitz wouldn’t like that,” he said.
“What?”
“Us having a private chat.”
I thought back to what Fitz had said about having a problem with Dylan liking me. And I remembered the part about someone having noticed us talking in the club.
“Fitz is busy,” I said.
There was nobody else around; the caterers had packed up their stuff and gone already. He followed me into the bathroom and sat on the easy chair while I stripped off the evening gown and replaced it with a sparkly cutaway dress in electric blue.
“Do you know what’s up with Caddy?” I asked. She’d gone right into the lounge with Fitz and Arnold, arm in arm with both of them, leaving me no chance to take her aside.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“She’s giving me filthy looks. I don’t know what I’ve done to upset her.”
He stared at me and then a slow smile crossed his face.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on, Dylan?”
“You were getting cozy with Fitz,” he said.
“So what? And anyway, I wasn’t ‘getting cozy.’ I was socializing, which is what I think I’m being paid for.”
“Calm down,” he said. “I just meant that she wouldn’t like you being cozy with Fitz, because she’s got a thing for him.”
“Caddy and Fitz? They’re a couple?”
He smiled again. “Well, in her dreams maybe.”
Lots of things were starting to make sense. “But he’s not so keen on her?”
“He fucked her once or twice. He used to fuck all the girls, the ones that would let him, that is. Then he had a couple of them go a bit nuts on him and he realized it was a bad idea. One of them got pregnant. Trouble is, he didn’t exactly finish with Caddy, not in any official sort of way, so she still thinks she’s got a shot.”
“Why doesn’t he just tell her he’s not interested?”
“I don’t think he has the faintest clue how she feels. And if she told him straight out, he’d get rid of her. He doesn’t like his girls clingy, not anymore.”
“No wonder she was shooting daggers at me,” I said, remembering Fitz’s arm around my waist, his wet whiskey-kiss on my cheek.
“What do you make of Leon Arnold?” he asked me then.
“Seems all right,” I said. “Why?”
Dylan scratched his jaw line thoughtfully. “He’s a big player, that’s all. Last time you were here, the guys Fitz was talking to, that was all about setting up this meeting with Arnold.”
“Really?” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t know that earlier. I’d have been nervous.”
“I never met him before. Heard of him, of course.”
“You think this deal is a bad idea?”
“Fitz knows what he’s doing.”
“What’s he want?”
“With Arnold? Same as always—earn his fortune. Like you.” His tone suggested that this was the end of the discussion. “Just better do a good job dancing, is all.”
I pulled my hair out of the pleat, shaking it free, and took off the low-heeled sandals that were useful for socializing with men who were shorter than me. In my bag I had a pair of high-heeled patent shoes with a velvet ribbon that crisscrossed around my ankle and reminded me of the ballet lessons I’d had when I was nine years old.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Nothing gets to you, does it, Dylan?”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. You must care about something. There must be someone who really means something to you. You married?”
He didn’t answer, which I took to mean that he was.
“Come on,” I said. “I thought we were friends. I thought you said you trusted me.”
“I was with someone,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Any kids?”
There was a long pause. This was like pulling teeth.
“I’ve got a daughter. Lauren. She’s fourteen.”
“You see her often?”
“Not often enough. She lives in Spain, with her mother.”
“Oh. Spain—that must be hard on you.”
“Yeah, anyway, are you ready?” The conversation was clearly at an end.
“Will you be watching?” I asked him.
“Don’t have much choice,” he said.
I went to wait in the kitchen like a good girl, while Dylan headed upstairs to the sitting room to check that the other girls weren’t getting too drunk.
When Carling had gone, I got dressed in my jeans and fleece and went to the Scarisbrick Jean. Malcolm and Josie were just finishing their dinner: pasta with some kind of sauce that smelled of garlic.
“You hungry?” Josie asked me cheerfully. She looked pale despite her colorful sweater. She’d had her hair done in preparation for the wedding—was it her niece’s?—and in place of the usual dark threaded with silver it was a warm chocolate color. It made her look years younger.
“No, no,” I lied, “I’ve just eaten.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “we’ve got leftovers.”
She spooned some tagliatelle and sauce onto a plate and I sat down at their dinette. “Your hair looks gorgeous,” I said.
I saw a pointed look pass between Malcolm and Josie. Malcolm’s hair, I noticed, remained resolutely wild.
“Thank you,” she said firmly, as if making a point. I wondered if Malcolm had failed to notice and was somehow living in purgatory as a result. He wasn’t looking particularly cheerful.
“How have you been?” I asked Josie quietly.
“Oh, you know. Up and down.” There were tears in her eyes but she blinked them away with a deep breath. She took her plate and Malcolm’s to the sink in the galley and started doing the dishes, banging and crashing cabinet doors with enough gusto to drown out the rest of the conversation.
“My battery’s charged,” I said to Malcolm between mouthfuls.
He looked up then. “Yeah. Probably is.”
“And they didn’t take it. You know.”
“Right.”
“What’s up?” I asked, realizing the distinct displeasure in his tone was directed at me.
“You,” he said. “Fraternizing with the gavvers.”
“You mean Carling? He’s all
right. He helped me look for a tub.”
He looked at me for a moment as though he didn’t know quite what to make of me, and then he laughed out loud, his head back.
“Look,” I said, when he’d finished sniggering at the thought of me and a police officer looking at bathtubs, “I needed protection last night, all right? He was happy to stay. So this morning I’m still alive.”
“Whatever,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye.
“I need to move the boat, Malcolm. Those people will probably come back for another go.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll do it tomorrow. All right? Too dark now to do anything. You can sleep here tonight, if you don’t want to be in that boat on your own.”
I looked up and down the length of the boat. “Sleep where?”
He tapped a bony finger against the side of his nose. “Aha,” he said. “You’ll need a duvet or something; we don’t have anywhere to keep spares.”
“I can’t leave the boat, Malcolm. What if they come back tonight?”
“You could bring it with you. This package of yours.”
“Don’t be silly. Then I’d be putting you and Josie in danger, too. Besides, it’s obviously well hidden where it is, right?”
He stared at me for a moment, deep in thought. Then he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
I went back to the Revenge of the Tide and collected the duvet, a pillow, and my toothbrush, as well as my cell phones. When I came back to the Aunty Jean, Malcolm was out on the dock with some fine-grade steel wire and a pair of pliers.
“What’s he doing out there?” Josie asked as I climbed down into the cabin with armfuls of duvet.
“Oh, I don’t know—fixing something, I guess,” I said.
“It’s going to be lovely having you here. Like a sleepover.”
I had no idea what she thought I was doing, sleeping on their boat when mine was just ten feet or so farther up the dock. Malcolm had told her something about the stove needing looking at and that had seemed to satisfy any curiosity.
When all the dishes had been cleared away, Josie showed me the hidden single bed that slid out from under the dinette like a giant drawer. Of course, while it was out they would need to step over me if they wanted to get from the dinette to the galley or back again, but the likelihood of that in the middle of the night was fortunately quite slim.
Outside, Malcolm was putting the finishing touches to the elaborate set of trip wires he had fixed at ankle-height across our dock. If Nicks or any of Fitz’s men came to have another go at the boat tonight they would make enough noise to wake up the whole marina.
Once I got started, things progressed pretty much as they had for my first visit to Fitz’s house.
For the first dance, all the men were present except for Fitz and Arnold. I got the distinct impression that I was there to babysit the other men while they took care of whatever business they had to discuss, in private.
True to his word, Dylan stood in the doorway, watching as I did my routine, monitoring me and keeping an eye on the guests, as he had been told to do. He blended into the background, motionless and silent.
I’d just finished when the door opened and Fitz and Arnold came in, bringing Caddy with them. She was a little unsteady on her feet. I gave her a warm smile, which she did not return.
“Aw, look, Leon—we’ve just missed the first dance,” Fitz said, pouring two large glasses of whiskey from the liquor cabinet.
I blew a kiss to Leon. “I’ll be back soon,” I said to him. “Don’t miss the next one.”
I skipped out of the room and Dylan shut the door behind me. Just enough time for a very quick change in the bathroom, and some makeup repair.
The bathroom wasn’t empty; two of the blond girls from dinner were in there doing lines of coke on the polished marble countertop. They shut up as I opened the door and almost immediately started arguing again when they saw it was only me.
“Well, you can fuck right off,” the taller one said. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe and acrylic-heeled stilettos, and most likely not very much else.
“Don’t give me that,” came the reply, high-pitched, close to tears. “It was your fucking idea. Don’t back out now, come on!”
“What’s up?” I asked casually.
They both stared at me as though suddenly united in their concern that I was going to get involved and therefore somehow want to share the last two lines of powder that were still on the vanity unit.
“She,” said the younger one, pointing with a shaking, manicured finger at the blonde in the robe, “said we should try and get Leon in for a threesome and we could split the tip, and I said yeah, and now she’s changed her mind!”
There was a sigh and a hand on the hip in a gesture of defiance. “It wasn’t like that, Bella, you know it wasn’t, I was fucking joking, honestly.”
“Could be passing up a very lucrative opportunity,” I said, reapplying lip gloss.
“That’s exactly what I said!” exclaimed Bella.
“But, seriously, it would take a lot of fucking money for me to do him on my own, never mind with someone else to fucking worry about.”
“It’s called taking one for the team. Don’t expect you’ve ever heard of that, before, have you, Diane?”
“I’ve had enough of this shit. Are we doing this line or what?”
Differences set aside in the interest of ingesting drugs, the two girls bent for their second lines in turn and paused for a moment before continuing the argument.
“Would you do it?” Diane asked. It took me a second to realize that she was talking to me.
“Why are you two down here, anyway?” I said. “Shouldn’t you both be entertaining the guests?”
“Oh, don’t you start. You’re worse than fucking Dylan.”
“He’s always bloody nagging us. We came down here to get a moment’s peace—you know,” said Bella, nodding toward the smear of white residue before wiping it off the counter with a moistened finger and rubbing it on her gums.
“Come on, Bel,” said Diane, “let’s go and find somewhere warmer. Bit frosty in here.”
They left the bathroom to me, and I had a quick check through my bag to make sure my purse and phone were still there. I wouldn’t have trusted them with any of my belongings and I wasn’t surprised to find my bag unzipped. They’d probably gone in there to see if I had a stash of coke myself.
When the door opened again, I was about to tell them to fuck off and leave me alone, but this time it was Dylan.
“Hello,” I said, turning back to the mirror. “Don’t bother to knock or anything civilized like that, will you?”
“Seen it all before,” he said in reply. He sat himself down on the chair and regarded me thoughtfully.
“What?” I said at last, to his reflection in the mirror.
“Fitz is pissed off,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s not good.”
“The deal’s not going down.”
“Why not?”
“Some of Arnold’s lads have been sharing the samples with the girls upstairs.”
“That’ll explain why two of them were in here a minute ago powdering their noses.”
Dylan ran a weary hand over his forehead. “Fuck’s sake. They’re a fucking liability.” He stood up and headed toward the door with a sigh.
“Dylan?”
“What?”
“Anything I can do to help?”
He laughed. “You can cheer Fitz up, for starters. If anyone can put a smile back on his face, it’s you.”
“What about Caddy?”
“She’s upstairs. Sulking.”
I woke up before it was fully light.
For a second I had no idea where I was, only that I wasn’t in my bed; the boat was rocking alarmingly from side to side and, moments later, I heard footsteps near my head. I sat up with alarm.
“Go back to sleep,” came an urgent whisper. “It’s only me.”
“Malcolm? What’s going on
?”
“I heard a noise outside,” he whispered, crouching down next to the pull-out mattress. “Think it’s just a fox or something, by the garbage. Nobody out there.”
“Oh.”
I lay back down on the bed and pulled the duvet up around my ears.
It was chilly now, light enough to see the outline of the cabin and the shapes of the galley cabinets, the woodstove, burned out and cold. I guessed it was about four or five, the same time of day that I’d found Caddy’s body in the water.
I thought of all those trip wires outside on the dock and hoped to God I would remember they were there when I went back to the Revenge of the Tide, otherwise I was likely to take a dip in the mud myself, headfirst, duvet and all.
I listened to the noise of the birds and the gulls and the distant roar of the traffic heading up the M2 toward London, and I was just drifting off to sleep when a sudden thought struck me. Malcolm had been fully dressed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
When I headed back toward the lounge, I became aware that something wasn’t right. The door was open and through it I could see Arnold sprawled on the sofa with two of his men; there was no sign of Fitz, or Dylan, or any of the girls.
From somewhere upstairs I could hear raised voices, the sound of something heavy falling.
I put on my best Viva smile and entered the room, closing the door discreetly behind me. “Gentlemen,” I said, “can I get anyone a drink?”
Waitressing wasn’t, strictly speaking, part of my duties, but they didn’t know this, and one by one I served them various spirits, mostly neat.
I sat on the arm of Arnold’s chair. He put his hand on my ass and gave it a friendly pat.
“While we’re waiting,” I said, “would you like me to dance, or would you prefer it if I left you to continue your conversation?”
“A dance would be good,” Arnold said. “Especially since I missed the last one. I’ve heard some very good things about you, Viva.”
“In that case,” I said, working my way through the list of music on the laptop, “I’ll have to make sure you get something very special indeed.”
I didn’t know if they were expecting me to be naked, or to strip, but if they were disappointed that I kept my skimpy black dress on they didn’t show it. Especially given that they could have trotted off upstairs and sampled something far more tactile if they’d chosen to do so. Instead, they sat and watched, and I held their undivided attention until, four tracks and twenty-two minutes later, the door opened and Fitz and Dylan came in.